is this possible?

[mrblock]

Is it possible to tell if an address belongs to mtgox? I know that they like to move coins around and its not a traditional wallet so that believes me to believe that one should be able to tell if it as mtgox wallet or not.

Also, this is hypothetical of course, if someone stole a substantial amount of bitcoins from one wallet or various wallets,  isn't there a way to at least trace them to some point? There has to be some sort of programs out there to show this type of data.

I know that they say bitcoin is anonymous but if everything is saved in the blockchain, wouldnt there be some way to follow the coins? granted, I wouldnt think it would be an easy task, but if its possible how could one track them? At least to some point? I thought that after the bitcoinica hack, they were able to put a hold on many coins because of something like this...

[makairamazara]

If a mixing service is used it is practically impossible to "follow the coins" via the blockchain.

Consider a payment of 5BTC is made from user X to user Y via a mixer.

User X pays an intermediary, or mixing service, which takes that 5BTC and splits it up into a variable number of finite amounts adding up to 5BTC.

The mixers first wallet then sends out each of those pieces to other mixer wallets it maintains, which then do the same thing as that first wallet.

Ultimately, a certain number of wallets maintained by the mixer combine to send the end-user's wallet the 5BTC total (Usually minus a mixing fee).

[master-P]

Wow didn't know what a mixer was.

[TheBigYak]

See http://www.bitcoinfog.com/ for an example of a mixer.. you'll need TOR (torproject.org) to access it though for obvious reasons.