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>It's a very interesting development as it shows that stolen bitcoins can be tracked indefinitely unlike FIAT.

You can track dollar bills by their serial number. It's basically the same thing as what's going on here, except that few people record the serial numbers of their bills.

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Hmm, not in real life. I can write a script that parses the blockchain and keeps track of the transactions.

How many people/authorities can do that with FIAT? Not to count the impossibility of actually tracking down FIAT that has not been used by a bank or authority that CAN actually control the unique number :-)

So in case 1 it's very easy to do, in second case is almost impossible outside very well defined scenarios (police trying to frame drug dealers, etc.)

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