I have accounts with Kraken, Coinbase/GDAX, Poloniex, LocalBitcoins, Bittrex, Bitstamp, and BTCE. I have been involved in cryptocurrrencies since 2013. I live in the United States. I do not have an account with Gemini. I am a large customer, meaning that my account is six figures. I am a very experienced investor, and I have lived all over the world.
In 2013, investing in Bitcoin was scary. You had to buy your coins on LocalBitcoins, and if a bank got wind of what you were doing, they might shut your account down. You might even be arrested, depending on what country you lived in. The exchanges that existed, Bitstamp and BTCE, gave the impression that they were run by gangsters in either Eastern Europe or Russia. You were lucky if you could get your money out of them.
Now, in 2017, the advent of regulated U.S. exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini has improved the situation somewhat. However, one large U.S. financial institution recently unilaterally closed my account because I was sending wires to Kraken.
The other major problem nowadays is that the customer support provided by these exchanges is abysmal or non-existent.
I recently wrote a review of Kraken where I gave them five stars. This was based on the fact that they had verified me as a Tier 4 customer, had a dialog with me about what limits I needed, and were able to resolve all problems in a reasonable amount of time. Kraken\'s interface is horrible, practically unusable, and their volume is bad. Since that time, Kraken\'s customer service has worsened. Now, instead of resolving issues, they ignore them and then two weeks later close the issue with a comment that they hope the issue is resolved (it was not).
A month ago, Coinbase was in my opinion unusable. They literally had never responded to a single one of my queries. New queries were merely aggregated into one monster query thread and never answered. As a result, I could not get money into Coinbase.
Recently, however, Coinbase has realized the error of their ways, and they are making a concerted effort to improve customer service. From my perspective, they have recently attempted to resolve issues I raised two months ago. They are making progress.
In addition, they allow wire transfers of amounts up to $250,000 per day, which is adequate. Much of their verification is automated and works fine. And GDAX is a high volume exchange and much better than Kraken.
Therefore, for all the above reasons, I now recommend Coinbase and GDAX (same firm) over Kraken for U.S. investors.
I have read reports that Coinbase has arbitrarily frozen customer accounts because they took vacations to Cuba, so you might wish to move your coins to your own wallet rather than keeping them at Coinbase after you buy them.
by xfcdes, Aug 2017
Source: www.cryptocompare.com
