Well, coins all live at a specific "address". We can see where these 25000 BTC have gone, but it is trivial to create new addresses and move BTC to them. This i

Well, coins all live at a specific "address". We can see where these 25000 BTC have gone, but it is trivial to create new addresses and move BTC to them. This is also, of course, public. For any address we can see the chain of how the BTC it possesses has gotten there though, and not accept BTC that have passed through the address that these were sent to. But that is expensive to do. Despite the network being public it's very difficult to prevent these BTC from being "anonymized". Many bitcoin "mixing" services already exist to trade BTC for random other BTC. You can already see these 25k BTC being distributed across many bitcoin wallets: http://blockexplorer.com/tx/d878b5784c2c1f6642d83faeab86e97faba758b2733a572d181ee823faf54278#i1156170 http://blockexplorer.com/tx/d878b5784c2c1f6642d83faeab86e97f... (follow the "output" chains)