Eventually all addresses will contain coin from all other addresses, if they are spent. It's the Kevin Bacon rating for currency.

In the short term, referencing Blockchain transaction over a given period of time, a destination address could be assigned a lower karma value for having a relationship with a bad actor address. The karma could be measured in amounts taken from other bad karma addresses.

While your wallet may contain trace amounts of bad karma money, it eventually gets diluted over time. Maybe we could utilize a days destroyed karma as well.

"Bad coin" diluted into legitimate users just means the people who were thieves got away with spending the money. That's bad.

> The problem with Bitcoin is that because there's no fee associated with them, there's no money or resources being made available or directed towards policing and following of these thieves.

How do you know that? Given the amount that was stolen, I would be very surprised if some victims are not employing considerable resources to find the thieves. Also given the amount, many layers and private investigators are probably willing to do speculative work on commission. It would just be silly for them to advertise such efforts.

The relevant amount lost is the amount lost by the person who is hiring said lawyer/private investigator, not the overall amount.

Let's say there are 2 categories of addresses involved with these coins; addresses that have been sufficiently analyzed (so you don't care anymore about tracking them) and addresses that have not been sufficiently analyzed.

Following the second category is roughly instantaneous, it's all on the block chain. So in some ways, the chase gets easier over time.

It would be helpful to know the costs of tracking these transactions, and how they may grow or be maintained over time.

Wouldn't, in this high profile clustereff, somehow tracking down those bitcoins cause bitcoin in general more harm than good? Would it not highlight that one way or another, either by fault of bitcoin or human error, that like Tor it is not bulletproof in terms of anonymity and susceptibility to being taken back from someone, whether that someone is a good or bad guy?

Taken back? Finding a person is one thing - you need a lot of resources to track a person down - then trying to find where they may have hidden the keys needed to use the Bitcoin is another. People who have stolen millions of real dollars are still able to just hide the cash or money in off-shore accounts. Similar problems exist, though it doesn't start off anonymously. It's not really good or bad, it just is. We need to manage for best case scenario, and structure systems to provide best case scenarios. Controlled or rather fully-manageable ecosystems are the best, though they have the ability to be badly managed and through political lobbying, etc. cause a whole series of problems in a society.

To be clear, Bitcoin is not supposed to be anonymous. The centerpiece of its design is a publicly view-able log of every transaction ever made.