Thanks for the support, SDG! It feels amazing to lend a hand to this community.

Here's my feedback:

• "Are you running this on a local machine that you have or a cloud server?"
  • I'm writing code locally (like building the currency.cpp application) and then using the ./eosc function to interact with the EOS.IO blockchain which is running on a set of remote servers (I believe).

In order to interact with the public testnet, you need to start running a local node using the ./eosd (or ./eosiod) command. I think about this like opening a communication portal between you and the blockchain. Once ./eosd is running, you can start sending actions to the eosio blockchain using the ./eosc (or ./eosioc) command which allows you to publish contracts, execute a contract, etc.

• "If it is a local machine what is your configuration?"
  • I'm using a 2014 macbook pro with download speed of about 50Mbps and an upload of 10Mbps, which isn't too fast and pretty available to most people.

Try getting just the .eosd and .eosc working and see if you can connect ( or 'ping') the testnet blockchain using the following command:

$ ./eosc -H testnet1.eos.io -p 80 get account powderskier

Once you can do that simple test case, you just confirmed that you can send commands and retrieve data from the eosio blockchain (and you know that your connection speed can handle the basic use case of running a node.) From there, try to publish a simple example dapp and grow your application from there.
-Gunnar