any of the many exchanges where you can convert coins to fiat?

During high volume in the past Coinbase has suspended withdrawals of Ether. Call it a glitch, scaling issue, or whatever but it's still a valid concern.

"whatever" - market manipulation?

I think on more than one occasion, Coinbase, and other exchanges have been guilty of having outages/ suspending withdrawals etc during crashes... never seems to happen during upswings, though...

That is a serious accusation. They have had outages during peak traffic.

I saw it happen during dips (but not spikes!) on Coinbase three times in two months.

I'm not buying that it's a scaling issue personally.

Even though it happened during peak usage it can't be a scaling issue?

Or to more solid coins.

Or to buy actual assets like real estate with them.