This seems like a decent place to ask: What is the most legit and safe method for creating a wallet and just buying a bit of Bitcoin? I wouldn't mind being able to drop a couple hundred on it and seeing where it goes, but it's hard to trust websites/subreddits that look like posts were written by nerdy 15 year olds.
Coinbase is the only answer here, and it makes me frustrated to still see the "buy a hardware wallet" recommendations. I recently had my hardware wallet (a trezor, which is the nicest one) fail during a firmware update. Now, obviously I have a backup of my seed, but for those few minutes that backup became a VERY expensive little widget. When I travel, I have to worry about where my backups are stored. Storing them i…
That is such terribly bad advice that I cannot ignore your post. Storing any amount of coins on an exchange is a liability that is far more considerable than keeping your funds on an encrypted USB-key sized device that you can keep at your home, or at the bank, or anywhere you think it will be reasonably safe. It has fail-recovery procedures built-in so that even in the event of a hypothetical hardware failure, you can recover your funds. If you're even a tiny bit technical it won't be a problem at all.
Your argument boils down to your one single bad experience with a hardware wallet that you dub the "nicest one" despite popular knowledge and maybe because of its price alone. And that's despite being able to recover your funds safely as advertised. And the rest of your post is split between audacious comparisons between banks and exchanges that I won't bother to address; and appeals to authority ("exchanges know better!") that has been debunked over and over again in very recent history. I don't ask you to believe me, for every high-profile case you hear of MtGox, Bitfinex, BTC-e etc. there are many more smaller exchanges that (just like the big ones) sink with their customers' funds.