im on the same boat.
i think of cashing out, but going thru coinbase or any other mainstream service means i'll be taxed heavily and that my account might get shut down at my bank if i get a random usd deposit for selling btc ( there was a huge amount of people having this issue when everyone was cashing out around 20,000 usd ), so i figure face-to-face would be best, but at the same time, i don't want to sit around worried someone's going to hand me a wad of fake cash or engage me in some odd complicated wire transfer scam...
maybe when btc goes to a new ATH ( hopefully ) the transaction will be worth the trouble.
If you want to do it through your bank, at least go talk to them. Show them your deposits. Or, look for another more BTC-friendly bank, rather than get it frozen.
olliecrypto, I am wondering why you think you "might get shut down at [your] bank" ?
Part of the reason I ask is that for the past 10 months I have been slowly liquidating an estate of a relative of mine who had a few bitcoins that he bought/traded/collected over the years. My main route to $USD has been through using one of the large trading exchanges to convert the BTC to USD, and then transferring the USD to a conventional bank. It took some time to initially set up the account on the trading exchange and linking to a regular bank, but otherwise has been working seamlessly for almost a year now.
To be honest, I never considered that my bank might "shut me down" by getting random USD deposits. I just assumed that there is a lot of business these days going on through the net and from all sorts of financially related institutions, to and fro their customer base. Especially if the amounts are not too large. I forget what the threshold is for suspecting or detecting nefarious money transfers, but the number that comes to mind is around $10000.
Also, I don't convert the BTC all that often. Maybe once every two months. So if you want to rapidly cash out all in one move, that is probably more risky, but for other reasons as well.
In any event, assuming you are engaging in legitimate and legal business your concern may be misplaced.
Now this is not to say that the taxes/fees in exchanging the money is not high. I am ok with what I get charged, but you may not agree, certainly each person's situation is going to vary.