Experience so far, BTC

In order to post in other forums, I need to post here first. I'm a newbie here.

So....if it helps, I'll give some feedback on my experience so far. I just started my interest in bitcoins in early December a few days after the China announcement. My experience so far on some fronts:

1. I'm in the US. It is extremely hard to get in and start buying/selling in the US quickly.

2. I'm thumbs down on Coinbase so far, but have hopes. I have lost over $12,000 in profit due to canceled trades on their side (false positive fraud cancellations), that seemed to benefit them. 3 of them were canceled at the very last minute after I was to finally (1 week later) receive the bitcoin and they had my cash in hand for almost a week already. I work in analytics and large scale systems. That kind of processing delay just doesn't make sense to me, even if you're utterly nuts and using a schema DB like Mongo for transactional +/- hadoop for analytics. Nosql is silly given the data has structure, so the performance hits from those choices just strike me as uninformed. Even so, if I were a skeptical person, a week delay until the last minute just doesn't make sense. So at first glance something seems fishy there that has a bad taste of some hedging going on with customer and Coinbase asests.
But they are US based and are well funded here in the valley for their stage now, so I have hopes they will improve their fraud detection+service, and I'm willing to believe for now they are not hedging assests (that is a world of trouble later for them once a lawsuit starts, it wouldn't be hard to prove if it was really happening). I'll come back to them later, right now they just cause me losses due to delays, cancellations and locking up my own cash in the process for literally two weeks at a time.

3. I tried localbitcoins to good success with a met a really great, informed community member I am brainstorming with now on other ideas. Problem there is these folks want to really only deal in cash for fraud and "other" reasons.. Banks make that hard to get in larger sums. I plan on tracking everything and reporting/paying taxes if I happen to make money in bitcoins as I support it, use it for transactions and help it grow as well if I can in other ways.

4. I've set up MtGox, Bitstamp and Campx accounts. The delays in getting going here are extreme. Account validiation takes forever as do the limited ways to deposit. Bitstamp looked like it was a good spot, but when I went to make a deposit, I saw their bank is actually in Slovenia. Headquarters in UK, but their bank is in Slovenia. That raised some major red flags for me, and I'm reluctant to send any large amounts of cash transfer to Slovenia (ahem). Campbx is US based which gives me more confidence, they are following all the rules the US has mandated. So I'm trying out Campbx now, but I hear of depth problems there exchange wise. Their verification process is also painful and long.

5. For the US at least, and certainly China now, there are clearly very large barriers to being able to just jump in and start trading with trusted companies, at some notable scale. The governments of course all want identity tracking coming in and going out for funds, so these regulations here are creating barriers to just getting in quickly. It takes too much time to get to a point where you can rapidly be up and trading in larger volumes than $1-6000. In many ways I think this is probably helping slow changes in price since these barriers exist. A positive it seems is that makes it a better time to be in now while you have more time to react to price changes therefore. So delays and risk of fraud are still keeping people out at a massive scale I suspect.

6. BTC is still too technical. I'm an engineer and dig that part, but I can clearly see its just too hard right now to make wallets, keep them safe and transact in general. There is just massive opportunity on so many fronts business wise. I believe in crytocurrency and its future. I think the shady side of it (like tumblers) will need to be addressed before it really becomes accepted, integrated and mainstream. That will allow the internal tracking of asset flow its seems (no tumblers). If they add identity tracking on assets going in and asests going out, that leaves the internal flow of coins as a major gap in transparency. So my guess is cyptocurrency will succeed more and more, and just like we saw with megaupload and file sharing, we will see tumblers start to targeted by law enforcement. I admit I am naive still on how bitcoin really works internally at a detailed level, so maybe that guess is way off. Please correct me.

Random dump done. Feedback welcome to correct me or laugh. Just trying to share experience, and learn.