I started saying this in the early 2000's... The first 5 years or so of offshoring, you're losing money. The next 5 years or so, you're breaking even(ish), but you're still behind because of the loss the first few years. By the end of the third five-year period, you're finally money ahead... but now you have no corporate knowledge, the people who've gained experience at your expense now want MORE money (so much that you consider on-shoring the work again), your support hours are often offset significantly or nearly 100% from your work hours, and... no local developers want to work for your company because they've seen what you did with your developers. Your only bet will be to onshore the work through contractors or new companies. 15 years later, I'm seeing my prediction come true... and companies are suffering, badly, as a result. It's got ZERO to do with flexibility, and everything to do with the appearance of saving money. I saw it happen, directly, at SunGard Availability Services, EMC, and Dell. I'm sure it's happening elsewhere, too. Decent managers will see it happening and wil have made the business case to retain onshore devs, in whole or in part, and it'll save those companies a mountain of cash in the long run.

Because ransomware did not exist before the introduction of the BitCoin?

Correlation is not causality.

No, thanks to banks a lot of electronic fiat cannot be traced.

Don't know much about forensics, do you?

There's nothing to cash in - BC is cash*.

"cashing in" requires, at some point, a trade of something for something ELSE. At some point, it turns into someTHING that has intrinsic value.. Chickens, bread, Gold...

Rather than manually withdrawing, contact PayPal and have "Auto-Sweep" enabled. Doing so means that funds in your PayPal balance are automatically swept into your connected bank account at the end of each day. I have one client who deals in paramilitary gear who (temporarily) lost close to $100k when PayPal froze his accounts after someone claimed he was selling firearms and ammunition (which wasn't the case, not even remotely!) and using PayPal for doing such.

This is why.