There are a lot of reasons to hate Coinbase. For starters, their CEO Brian Armstrong has been trying to fire the core developers for the past few years and turn bitcoin into some kind of crop coin, they have non existent customer support and they charge their customers insanely high fees while at the same time not implementing SegWit. Now, on top of all this I received the following email from coinbase this morning.... “You are receiving this email because our records indicate that your GDAX / Coinbase account meets the threshold for tax reporting. As a result, we will be submitting a 1099K to the IRS on your behalf.” Unless you want to be audited by the IRS then you should buy your bitcoin elsewhere.
Yes, I think it's best to avoid Coinbase at this stage if you would like a little privacy. As we reported here, Coinbase are now required to report to the IRS any US-based customers who made buy, sell or send transaction greater than $20,000.
If you want to buy large quantities of bitcoin and remain under the radar of the IRS or any tax authority then use a decentralised exchange or buy from Paxful or Localbitcoins. Otherwise you may get a huge tax bill in the future.
I don't understand why anyone uses Coinbase. Just this week they announced that they were buying a company called Neutrino that was set-up by the odious and hated "Hacking Team" who worked with authoritarian governments to have civil rights activists arrested. They then admitted that their previous analytics company is selling their users data. Coinbase customers should delete their account and use a different exchange. There are plenty of decent options like Kraken and CashApp.