Okay honest question: How did you get bitcoins? I've looked around and my options seem to be to give my CC number to a shady website or to meet someone in person and give them cash. Is there really no safe-sounding option?
[1] edit. Double checked and the looks like it's $17 million: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/26/bitcoin-gets-another-boost-...
They're also backed by ycombinator and Andreessen Horowitz.
The issue at Coinbase ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932224 ) was them taking weeks to fulfil orders, while sitting on your money, during which time the price of bitcoin was fluctuating wildly, and then processing them at the original bitcoin price, rather than the current (lower) price. End result is the customer getter far fewer bitcoins than the current market rate and accusations that Coinbase was pocketing the difference.
One of the submissions about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705 Note that it took considerable pressure from the HN community (and possibly YC) before Coinbase even refunded the guys losses. They wanted to just give him a token $50 worth of bitcoins, when the profit Coinbase had made from delaying the transaction was more like $12k.
This wasn't a one off either, there were other stories on HN ( e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360 ) and threads full of people on /r/bitcoin detailing similar experiences. Nobody could get their money out or get any reply from the company and for a while it looked like it was another mt.gox. There was a total failure of support and communication.
You are also wrong about the issue. What you are referencing is a specific time about a year ago. Note that all the posts you reference are exactly 343 days ago. Those issues have long been resolved on both individual and general scales. To bring them up now as if they are current issues is dishonest. We had one support person and a ticket queue of 8,000 items in the middle of a massive bubble and pop. That is why support "went dark". It took weeks to respond because it was not humanly possible to respond faster. We were working night and day. Now we have a team of 40 support with live chat, so it won't happen again.
The more common criticism we receive, and the one I was responding to, is the notion that we cancel orders due to "high risk" as an excuse when the price goes up (not down), because the coin is now more valuable and we'd profit by keeping it ourselves. That's just not how we work, and we have never done that. (It is never noted that we cancel as many transactions due to high risk when the price goes down, with the effect of actually saving false-positive users money they otherwise would have lost.) If you do not think this is our biggest criticism, or if you think the ones you referenced are still relevant, then you do not know enough about Coinbase to be making the claims that you are.
Seeing your question here and the answers it's getting, sometimes I feel like I'm the only one treating bitcoins like a currency instead of a commodity.
2) Any reputable exchange (Bitstamp, Coinbase)
3) LocalBitcoins