Picture this my friend. I have a ball named bitcoin that I wanted to hide from a cop that thinks I stole it (spoiler alert: I didn’t). Now I have this trusted friend we should call “wallet 2” where I could entrust the ball with for the meantime as I try to evade the law. With enough leads and evidences, there’s no doubt that the bitcoin ball will be traced back to wallet 2, and from there, I’m toast, the bitcoin’s gone, my identity’s blown, and people now see me as a ball thief in the neighborhood.

Now picture the same scenario, but instead of having only one friend to entrust the bitcoin ball with, I have 18 other friends correspondingly named wallets 3-18 which will pass the ball around in random to confuse investigators and the cops. They’d still suspect that I’m accomplices with the other 18 people in my friend circle, but there’s sure as shit no chance that they’d find the ball.

The principle applies to bitcoin too, merely passing the ball around doesn’t change the fact that the bitcoin cane from you, so with enough dedication and time for research any guy could trace bitcoins back to its original owner, but at the same time this doesn’t necessarily equate to them being able to find where the bitcoin is at the moment.