To reply to a recurring line of thought, Bitcoins are not atomic entities with serial numbers like dollar bills. You can't say "Bitcoin #AE472b was stolen" and then trace it through its life, or blacklist it.
Instead Bitcoin is a ledger that details wallets and accounts. The origin of balances came from mining, and then people made transactions that, on the official ledger, transferred some or all of those amounts to other wallets. And on, and on, and on.
Hypothetically, if the community were foolhardy enough to trust someone's list of "recipients of mislaid money" wallet ids, you could blacklist those wallets, or even, through group agreement, force transfers back. But that's where tumblers come in: Tumblers are group wallets that take transactions in from all sorts, and then distribute them anonymously to new wallets you control (after a service fee, of course). Anyone hiding their tracks will of course have used a tumbler, often anonymously run on the Tor network. Do you blacklist or reclaim from every wallet that took an output from a tumbler?
Bitcoin would be toast. Tumblers are something that legitimate users of the currency make use of. You won't get the cooperation of tumbler operators because they are themselves engaged in a very serious crime.
So the trace-ability claim repeatedly being made just doesn't hold when you have legitimate and illegitimate transactions by the millions all intermixed. When bitcoins are transferred...game over. Give up on that thought.
In this particular case, are tumblers viable? If I understand rightly, the stolen coins here are a significant percentage of the amount of bitcoins outstanding.
Instead Bitcoin is a ledger that details wallets and accounts. The origin of balances came from mining, and then people made transactions that, on the official ledger, transferred some or all of those amounts to other wallets. And on, and on, and on.
Hypothetically, if the community were foolhardy enough to trust someone's list of "recipients of mislaid money" wallet ids, you could blacklist those wallets, or even, through group agreement, force transfers back. But that's where tumblers come in: Tumblers are group wallets that take transactions in from all sorts, and then distribute them anonymously to new wallets you control (after a service fee, of course). Anyone hiding their tracks will of course have used a tumbler, often anonymously run on the Tor network. Do you blacklist or reclaim from every wallet that took an output from a tumbler?
Bitcoin would be toast. Tumblers are something that legitimate users of the currency make use of. You won't get the cooperation of tumbler operators because they are themselves engaged in a very serious crime.
So the trace-ability claim repeatedly being made just doesn't hold when you have legitimate and illegitimate transactions by the millions all intermixed. When bitcoins are transferred...game over. Give up on that thought.