I wouldn't use Coinbase to buy BTC. The IRS already tried to obtain all customer data before, and they conceded with "only customers who spend over $20,000".

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...

You make good points, but you can still buy BTC with Coinbase and then transfer them to your private wallet that you control.

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.

If you're not using illegally obtained funds to acquire coins, who cares if they get you "on the record"? This is only relevant if you want to evade capital gains tax at some point, which would be illegal anyway.

I've never quite understood people leaving their cryptocurrency in wallets held by exchanges. Exchanges are good for exchanging. Any time I've dealt with bitcoin (bought 10 when they were ~$3.30/ea, that was probably the best investment I'll ever make and was done on a lark for an online game) the coins spent only a couple minutes in the wallet on the exchange. Transfer to that wallet, sell, or buy then immediately (well once the transaction is confirmed, an ever-growing amount of time...) transfer to my personal wallet. And after Mt.Gox went away with $1200USD in my account with them (but 0 btc), I get the USD into a personal account ASAP as well. I'm surprised no exchanges have been made which only do this. Holding onto coins just seems like inviting trouble.

Out of curiosity, where do you recommend buying BTC?

I switched from Coinbase to Gemini. Their verification process is very quick and their customer service is too. Coinbase never responded to my ticket when I asked them why my purchase was pending for over a week.

> Am I wrong to be worried about uploading a picture of my passport to a US company?

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).

Well you sortof for legal compliance of "know your customer" laws. I wouldn't be too worried...there are many other things to be worried about...I don't think this ranks too high in the grand scheme.

Personally I would only ever buy from somewhere that requires photo ID.

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.

I tried to sign up for Coinbase back in July and kept running into problems during the id verification step (at some point, they thought I was under 18). I tried to work through their customer support, but only received automated messages.

Eventually, I gave up and went somewhere else.

I tried to sign up for an account there as well. Process and verification were just garbage. Never worked with a dozen tries, different IDs, etc. Wouldn't recommend.

What's the risk?

My biggest fear is identity fraud, but perhaps I can trust CoinBase enough for that not to be a problem. Still, I would much rather not upload a picture of my passport if I can help it.

What can anyone do with your real passport scan that they couldn't do with a fake passport scan with your name on it?

(answer is nothing)

My passport scan has a lot of real information about me: my birthday, my place of birth, my passport number, my PESEL, my nationality. That's a hell of a lot of information that could fall into the wrong person's hands.