True.

But even so, the average Coinbase user's reaction to receiving their first Bitcoin is "Now what do I do with it?"

Both of my parents had this reaction. And the only use they've found so far is to gamble it on altcoins like they have in the past with penny stocks!

So the whole "transferring coins or buying goods and services" part has a looooong way to go.

> And the only use they've found so far is to gamble it on altcoins like they have in the past with penny stocks!

Which is really all cryptocurrencies are good for at the moment. Nobody in their right mind would use anything so volatile to buy/sell goods and services.

I used to tell people this when they ask me how to buy Bitcoin but then one day I helped a friend and no, Coinbase can be really unfriendly sometimes. We tried to verify his account 20 times and even though it sometimes said it was OK it actually wasn't. The page kept bugging out, getting stuck and all kind of nonsense. In the end we had to give up.

Fwiw, this was outside the US.

Same experience here. It tooks me DAYS to have a working coinbase account. Their process was a pains in the *, verification a nightmare.

Please make sure you take your coins off of Coinbase (or any other exchange) as soon as you can. Here's a talk by the venerable Andreas Antonopoulos on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt-zXEsJ61U

tl;dr - Exchanges go bankrupt

Right, I was gonna say that Coinbase is currently the best way to buy and sell coins today. I can say that as I have accounts on a number of exchanges. Still, Coinbase does not let you know that they also operate GDAX.com, where you can "make a market" and buy/sell for no fee. A buy/sell on Coinbase is basically a market order on GDAX.

The problem there is that you can't do instant transactions. You need to transfer cash, wait for that to be received by GDAX, then trade. Unless you keep cash on gdax/coinbase, you will still need to buy coinbase if you are buying an unexpected dip.

Navigate to coinbase.com, scroll to bottom: Products - GDAX. Hardly a secret.

Sigh... "You just had to go the basement bathroom past the sign that says beware of the leopard!" (To misquote Douglas Adams). I had to have a friend tell me that there's seamless transfer between yhr 2 systems, if they really wanted to let you know they would've had this trading capability as no. 4 in their "Getting Started"..