Why do bitcoins don't have tracking numbers/id ?

[otomakansotas]

Going through the mailing lists, there is some discussion about how bitcoin should be considered like "grains of sand" or a "bucket of water" transferred around from wallet to wallet. However, this mechanism of keeping a the whole ledger of who owns what all the way to epoch, would not scale.
I haven't found a deeper discussion thread on pros and cons of having the coins (all the way to Satoshis) to be tagged , so that a database of who is a particular owner of a particular coin can be kept.
If there is such a thread, would be great , if someone could link.

[coolcountry]

I am wondering why this would be required at all? Like what is the point? It adds an unnecessary level of complexity if you want to keep track of the previous owners of a bitcoin, and it doesn't have any meaning at all. So I'm not convinced why such a feature would be required.

[otomakansotas]

Don't want to keep a list of all previous owners, just the current one ;  

Wouldn't it be much easier & compact to have only one simple map of <bitcoin-id:wallet-id>  ; and keep updating the wallet address as bitcoins change owners.
Lot more simpler to scale than the system we have now.
It will be a fixed sized map ;  a 2 dimensional array (or map for c++ programmers).

In terms of OOP, in this case the object becomes the coin (not the wallet address as in the current system).

[Sadnu]

Are Bitcoin transactions really private? In an age of ubiquitous government surveillance and corporate information collection, the peer-to-peer currency's boosters tout privacy as a major benefit. I'm not convinced. Bitcoin's peer-to-peer method for clearing payments means that the currency's "books" are inherently open.

[otomakansotas]

Not sure i understand your point sadnu. As a programmer, I am just puzzled by the technology choice of not "tagging" coins to make the ledger simple and compact ; as opposed to tracking "quantity" of bitcoins being passed around from wallet to wallet.
The current ledger / accounting methodology will grow infinity and break at some point.

I am sure i am missing a huge debate around this topic ;  hence the request if there was a debate on this early on in bitcoin dev days.