Would it be better to simply move out of the United States?
The user, I mean.
For the sake of using Bitfinex? I don't think so. Maybe if Trump had gotten reelected, I might advise otherwise, but that didn't happen (lol).
Ultimately, as they grew and got under the thumb of the USD banksters (or simply showed their true colors as the case may be) they became useless to me.
I'm not sure if Coinbase is more under the thumb of the big banks or the government--it's hard to tell, but I know where you're coming from as far as they're concerned. But a lot of exchanges that aren't based in the US have a hard time operating there, and if they can actually do it they can't provide service to every state (like Binance). I don't know what laws are on the books regarding crypto at the state level, but there's got to be something going on there.
And OP, I didn't know this particular fact about Bitfinex, never having used them but it's not surprising. We're not in the wild west days of crypto anymore. Or at least we're
nearly past that phase.