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One minor difference with Bitcoin is that there are no serial numbers. Every bitcoin is identical to every other bitcoin. The blockchain tracks transaction sour

One minor difference with Bitcoin is that there are no serial numbers. Every bitcoin is identical to every other bitcoin. The blockchain tracks transaction source, destination, and amount, but there's no way to identify a specific bitcoin. Such a concept is actually meaningless, there are no bitcoins, just transactions. This means that when a mixer or exchange wallet gets the bitcoins they can't be individually tracked anymore. This doesn't really matter in practice since all transactions are public.

FRex 9y ago
The bag analogy still works if you remove serial numbers and just say that one of the bags was known to have came from mafia. You still can't identify which of the end receivers was the mafia and the effect is still a 'cleaning' process: dirty and clean go in, only clean (as in clean or dirty but not provably distinguishable from clean) comes out.