To begin, I'm not new to cryptocurrencies, I bought and spent around 2BTC in 2015 with a little bit leftover. Recently I discovered this leftover had grown by a bit and put it to good use in Crypto20, then catching up with everything that's going on in the crypto space these days and buying a lil more.
Back then I bought my coin off a local exchange called CoinHako, which accepted deposits from a PayPal-like service called Xfers. Today, CoinHako's bank deposit has been down since November, while Xfers is also having problems. Then I visit Coinbase/GDAX, which I had verified myself on way back then but didn't use it due to unfavorable exchange rates. They've "disabled buys" on my account for some reason?(!) I try to resend verification again (paper bills, passports, ID, the lot) and it's been 3 weeks and NOTHING. Coinbase's reputation is basically the online equivalent of regurgitated vomit anyway so I give up on that and hit up a few other exchanges to get verified on any of those. BitBay, BitStamp, BitFinex, HitBTC, Luno, GateHub, and Kraken are all spewing the same bullshit along the lines of "we're busy and make take longer to verify you/respond to your tickets". It's not like I'm trying to do any illegal shit, you want my ID fuckin take it jesus.
Meanwhile, Gemini gets off their asses and verifies me within 6 hours, awesome. I then send about US$2000 their way (and it's the middle of the week mind you) which should take 1 working day - even says so on their site under "how long before my deposit shows up?". But it's been almost three days, the money is long gone from my account but there's no sign of it anywhere.
You'll say "oh nick why don't you just get it off other people eg. localbitcoin/remitano". I actually used the second option to buy some ether locally to top off my investment in Crypto20 a bit more and it's a painless, instant transaction thing but the premium you pay for that kind of shit is nothing short of daylight robbery.
Can someone advise how a regular joe is supposed to get into cryptocurrencies or is this some kind of geeky plaything limited to a small circle of elite hodlers, whales and speculators? So far my entire experience with the whole ecosystem is nothing short of extreme frustration and I fail to see how ANY coin is going to gain widespread practical usage the way things are right now. Everything seems to be either stupid, broken, congested or overloaded.
Just keep working man.
There is only a few Bitcoins being sold in the market, you can get them if you keep on working.