A lot of my overseas connections are exclusively Bitcoin now for payment. I have basically stopped doing business with them 1. Because I am ignorant when it comes to crypto, and 2. You have to enter a lot of personal information to purchase certain amounts of it.
trying to wrap my head around this as there are so many other payment platforms to use… can anyone enlighten me on why Bitcoin seems to now be the preferred currency for UGL?
I honestly couldn't tell you, at least for right now. I guess if they already had the infrastructure in place, it's not worth changing up. But considering the recent surge in BTC and the transaction fees going through the roof lately, I definitely wouldn't say it's a preferred method right now, at least for the buyer.
The privacy aspect may be something they're trying to harness, but BTC is a public ledger coin, so it's only as private as your methods of appropriating the funds to begin with are. This means if you sign-up with a major market exchange like Binance or Coinbase, they require KYC and it's not really untraceable.
Your vendor, they have probably setup their own BTC node (I'm guessing) so from their end, if they've done everything correctly, they can probably receive funds and discretely move to 3rd party non-custodial wallets without much hassle. But it won't cover your end of things.
Best way to use BTC anonymously is to buy it with cash through mail. However, with the transaction fees like they are right now, I'd wait for BTC to drop some more before buying larger amounts of it. The best way to purchase things anonymously isn't even through BTC anyways. These vendors should start looking into privacy coins like Monero. Their ring-signatures make it practically impossible to trace.
Even the FBI got desperate and put out a reward for anyone who could break XMR's ring-signatures. Most of the dark-net drug trade has transitioned from bitcoin to monero. I guess it takes a while for other more legitimate (or grey?) businesses to transition.