Wait, they scored millions but used an exchange???
Thats like Snowden stealing from NSA and using an American VPN service that promised "no logs" to try to cover his tracks. Something smells beyond fishy here
What most people who haven't actually used bitcoin may not understand is that due to the inherent way bitcoin is structured it cannot be used for everyday transactions... unlike the likes of venmo or cashapp or whatever, you cannot really use bitcoin to split lunch money or to run errands or for everyday purchases anymore. The built-in mechanism of verification transactions means the current transaction fee is equal to about $15 USD and it will only continue to rise as the bitcoin skyrockets... One of the original selling points of bitcoin was there were no transactions fees but this is becoming more of a joke now, every-time you send your friend say the equivalent of 5 bucks via a pure bitcoin transfer (without even getting any third party exchanges involved) you will have to pay the bitcoin system the equivalent of $15 more bucks in the form of verification fees for the transaction, this fee will continue to skyrocket as the price of bitcoin goes up.... Now how many people you reckon will go use an ATM withdraw to get a hundred dollars if it charged a fee of $15 ?
One way around this is to simply not have the transaction hit the blockchain... and then aggregate the payments/settlements... for example you can actually buy/sell/trade bitcoin right in the cashapp. So if you buy 10 bucks worth of bitcoin on cashapp and use the cashapp to transfer to your friend's cashapp account it doesn't even hit the blockchain, its just an internal transfer within cashapp. If you search for your transaction on the bitcoin blockchain you won't find it. For if it did actually hit the blockchain then your 10 bucks transfer would end up as -5, lol... So instead of being a distributed general ledger, bitcoin's blockchain is now effectively a meta-ledger of ledgers all controlled by the individual exchanges themselves... which kind of defeats the original point of using bitcoin to bypass any other government or corporate authority
Bitcoin is entirely reliant on the Internet and at the mercy of the individual governments/corps that allow it to exists... without the internet bitcoin dies... whereas the digital Yuan can work offline even without Internet connection. So between this and the ridiculous transaction fees and other un-scalable issues, bitcoin was never meant to be used for its purported intended initial purposes.
