My attempted use: transfer around £1000 from the UK to equivalent value ₪ NIS in Israel completely in compliance with all tax regs and not trying to hide anything.
Coinbase: went through the verification process, transferred £2 from my UK Bank Account. Got a cryptic email saying I can't be verified because despite having a UK Bank, I'm not resident there.
Moved to Bitstamp. Went through the verification process there which wasn't too tricky. Got to the end and realised they can't accept a direct UKP£ transfer from a UK Bank, they want a Euro deposit. I'm trying to AVOID international currency entanglements!
Back to Kraken. Their email loop REFUSES to send email to my mail server. They never make a connection. OK, give up, give my old Gmail account. Bang, verification email in seconds.
Upload my identity documents but I do have a gotcha: it's almost impossible to get proof of address and residence in Israel in English. And they want something less than 3 months old! All I've got is my Tax statement for this year but it's in Hebrew.
I send them that, a google translate screenshot showing how the Hebrew symbols of my name and address look in English. I send them a FedEX package cover I got last week.
I know this is all about Know Your Customer KYC regs, I do, I did on-boarding training for a major international Accounting firm's consultancy arm back before 2000, I know where this comes from, but this whole thing is what makes Crypto so unusable especially compared to the massive power of Visa/Mastercard and the derivative businesses like PayPal and Stripe.
This is just a sample of back and forth with Kraken support. You've got to be dedicated to get through a process like this.
