mixing them with other coins doesnt crush all hopes of traceability. Swapping them for other coins may help hide the link, but just adding them to a wallet with

mixing them with other coins doesnt crush all hopes of traceability. Swapping them for other coins may help hide the link, but just adding them to a wallet with other coins will taint the other coins rather than clean the stolen ones. In your example the stolen coins are in wallet X and Y and using the blockchain we can determine exactly how much in each wallet comes from the stolen coin. A true mixing service takes the coins into a wallet and sends you coins that are from another wallet that has never had any contact with the coins you sent in. This is what breaks the chain you can trace. Altcoin exchanges let you clean your coins by using an altcoin as the mixer. Essentially you send BTC to an exchange, buy an altcoin, transfer altcoin to another exchange, buty bitcoin. You now have much harder to trace bitcoin.