Quote:
Originally Posted by dyna mo
i'm not so sure it is fully anon. i've been trying to understand that better, but each and every transaction on the chain is publicly viewable, every one. i've read that can be backtraced  in some way to glean infos. i don't know how accurate that is but it is something i've come across |
You can trace the transactions but there are ways of making it very hard and possibly impossible to trace. There are services which jumble the bitcoins across 100+ wallets for a few hours then slowly spits the coins back out into multiple wallets in small denominations. As far as I know the actual bitcoin hash cannot be traced.
If you're really dedicated and want to search the blockchain for a few years you would eventually find where the bitcoins went.