A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
There already is such tracking going on, exchanges do freeze balances sometimes. The problem is that if the stolen coin gets traded before exchanges can freeze them you wind up with a lot of innocent people holding those coins and it&#x27;s not practical to freeze those later.<p>Consider these two scenarios: A stolen bike vs a stolen sack of coffee.<p>In the case of the bike, if you can find it you can take it back from someone else who bought it. You can identify it distinctly as your bike, even if it had been bought and sold multiple times.<p>Now imagine a stolen sack of coffee that the thief sells to a vendor at a market. The vendor dumps it into a big bin full of more coffee. Other people buy bags of it, some containing the stolen beans, some not, some a mix. Now you can&#x27;t identify your distinct stolen coffee anymore. It&#x27;s not practical to go after the coffee vendor or its customers.<p>Bitcoin works like the coffee example not the bike. Balances move around like so many kilos of coffee. If you were to make the coffee vendors or their customers liable for stolen beans they happen to touch then you can&#x27;t have a functioning coffee market at all.<p>Of course that isn&#x27;t to say the coffee vendor can&#x27;t do anything. If the stolen coffee or money is still in the hands of the coffee vendor then they should turn it over to the police when informed. If it&#x27;s already gone they can tell the police which way the thief went and how much money was paid. Hopefully the police can find the thief and take the proceeds of his crime to make the victim as whole as possible. Also, just because coffee beans can&#x27;t practically be identified distinctly doesn&#x27;t mean a coffee vendor that is knowingly trafficking in stolen coffee should get off the hook.<p>This is how it&#x27;s done now with cryptocurrency and the biggest practical problem seems to be that law enforcement doesn&#x27;t move fast enough to contact exchanges confirming that the claim of wrongdoing is bona fide.