Alternatively, could I use a web wallet to bounce coins around to obfuscate ownership?
Researchers can easily track such trivial ways of "attempted anonymization".
>>> We found out that there is a huge number of tiny transactions which move only a small fraction of a single bit- coin, but there are also hundreds of transactions which move more than 50,000 bitcoins. We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a suciently persistent way
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ALL BTC transactions are FOREVER archived in the bitcoin ledger. Its how it works.
That is also a pretty cool paper as well. Thanks for the link.
The recommend use of Bitcoin is that every payment you receive should be to a new address. This maximizes privacy and its necessary when you may have multiple concurrent payment in order to sort out which one you've received. Common wallet software (including the reference client) also always pays change to a new address.
... so it's a bummer that the authors of the paper went on to describe every coin assigned to an address which has never spent as in savings (roughly 60% of them), if not for a couple things engaging in the bad practice of address reuse they would have found 100% in "savings".
This joining means that even if you've been super careful to never link address A to you because you've done sketchy things with A, if at some point in the future (even distant future) you join A with another address that the someone CAN track, they now know you own A.