3 ms·

You track D and E. At scale, there surely are consistent patterns.

• blotter_paper 8y ago
  Yes, but my example was contrived for simplicity, and really D can make a transaction with an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs sent to and from an arbitrary number of addresses belonging to an arbitrary number of users. This is what bitcoin mixers do. Now we have a bunch of inputs coming in, and a bunch of evenly sized outputs coming out (with some unevenly sized ones for change). You can still probabilistically track funds if a user did something like putting coins from D into a big mixing transaction with other users and then sending their mixed coins from address F though I to a single address J that just so happens to have the same balance D started with, and of course there are less contrived situations where patterns of behavior would be evident, but this is all probabilistic and you still aren't really tracking individual coins; discrete coins aren't stored on the blockchain, transactions with input and output balances are. If the missing funds are tracked, and this whole affair was the result of malevolence rather than incompetence, I'd bet they're either sitting in a bunch of tiny accounts that have been cycled through mixers more than once or they're going to be before they're spent (having faked your own death, you could see holding off on the mixer until you've had ample time to cover your trail thus giving the appearance of incompetence rather than malevolence for a while).