So this almost made me register for a Coinbase account to finally buy some Bitcoins. That is until I got to the ID verification section. Am I wrong to be worried about uploading a picture of my passport to a US company?
Even outside of privacy issues, Coinbase goes down during critical periods often. Price crashing and you want to buy/sell quick? The site will likely be down.
Outside of accessibility issues, Having Bitcoin on coinbase is more like an I-O-U and defeats the purpose of cryptocurrency imo, which is having the private keys to your funds which only you control.
I recommend this guide to set a multisignature wallet through CoPay and Glidera. And managing your keys with a password manager like Enpass.
https://gist.github.com/paOol/d6c78c339cc5c4df6dd745d3bc2cc5...
This is very useful if you want to set up a long term investing strategy. For example you can set your debit card or bank transfer to automatically buy $500 of BTC each week, then monthly or quarterly transfer those coins to your private wallet based on your individual risk tolerance/free time.
As opposed to? I mean, if you travel anywhere, the US government has a scan of your passport.
Surely the bigger concern here is not the passport but the money you desire to give away to any company in exchange for a database entry that assigns you a fraction of a nascent digital currency.
If you do sign-up - and you should if you believe in Bitcoin's future - make sure to buy Bitcoin on Gdax. It's Coinbase's trading platform. Buy your coins there and you avoid the outrageous fees (as you're making the trade yourself rather than paying Coinbase to do it for you).
What? The government makes the passports.
An exchange that doesn't follow KYC laws is at the very least under threat of being shut down by the US.
It's part of the reason why I like coinbase so much, they are clearly following all the required laws.
Eventually, I gave up and went somewhere else.
(answer is nothing)