My current UK experience

Currently I can still pay Binance with my Bank of Scotland VISA card, but only via the Binance website. I just tested this yesterday, so I know it still works. A £20 deposit cost me £0.60. Dunno if that's a flat fee or a percentage, but it beats the crap out of every other alternative that I've tried. On both the desktop and mobile app, the GBP payment options are just gone, probably forever.

As one of the last holdouts in the UK, I suspect the Bank of Scotland will soon follow suit. I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long, given the pressures of the UK government's protection racket.

The only remaining options, at least one of which I will no doubt be forced to use eventually, are less than optimal. If I remember correctly, Coinbase wanted £3.40 for a £20 deposit, and that, incredibly, was actually the lowest fee among all the alternatives. I also tried KuCoin, BlockFi, and a few others. I think the typical ramping-on fee was in the £6 to £7 range.

Contrast that with Binance, before the UK government's protection racket, which was basically £0 fee for BACS transfer, and a few pennies trading fee, made even lower by paying in BNB.

I just added SwissBorg to my list, and I'm quite disappointed. First, it's just an investment platform like Coinbase, not a trading platform, and therefore I assume the spreads are shit, although they supposedly find the best prices across multiple exchanges, I saw nothing to back that up. The fee was the same £0.60 I paid on Binance, again for a £20 trade. Most disappointingly, where exactly are the "391 unique fiat and crypto trading pairs"? I only see a whopping total of 17. That's less than half what Coinbase offers, and even that is still shit.

Then there's Crypto.com. I only got that as a noob using an affiliate link to get free crypto and what I thought was going to be a crypto debit card, but which actually turned out to be just another cashback card, where the cashback is actually crypto, and even then not your preferred crypto, but CDC's own shitcoin. Months later, I realised how pointless this was for someone like me, as my disposable income is so low that every spare penny gets invested, not wasted on frivolous junk, so my cashback qualifying debit card spending is basically zero. But hey, at least the UK government mafia has not yet put the screws to CDC, so there's still the chance I might actually be able to use it to ramp on my fiat. It's been a while, so I have no idea what the fees are.

Then I hear people talking about Revolut, but I'm getting conflicting information. Some are saying it has already blocked Binance. Then there's the fact that the Euro prices for crypto are apparently much worse than sterling, or that the fees are higher, or something. Frankly it sounds like a complete waste of time.

At this point it feels like my best bet is simply to leave this stinking shithole of a country, and quit trying to do things the hard way.