Of course everyone has the ability to track down the path of the coins and then possibly confront the perpetrator and request them to return the coins.
A while ago I decided to track down the 'allinvain' stolen coins and see where they ended up. It turned out that by mid February they were distributed to over 100,000 different addresses, including 8 of my own addresses. I'm guessing somebody did a very good job of laundering them. Either that, or this is just the natural way that bitcoins are passed around.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/2900/659 is where I posted my findings.
Did some work on this before:
http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.htmlHave you seen this SVG we made, linked to from that page?
https://sites.google.com/site/btcanalysis/AllegedTheftBlogVersion.svg?attredirects=0&d=1You'll need to open it in something that renders SVGs well - I use Google Chrome.
If you mouse over the graphics, you can see the addresses.
The node: 104741, as we number them (this corresponds to
http://blockexplorer.com/address/12RyZB4odBmdenN6TPukb1ZR29DHKgMHuJ - the nodes in the SVG have clickable links to blockexplorer) (the node is in the top-middle of our diagram; but chrome etc will let you search the SVG to find it, by the number 104741), is where those coins you found, break off the main flow of funds, which we continued to track. We only rendered the principal flow of coins; our code follows the 2K of coins, and ignores the flow of ~20coins that break off, that you mention; 10 or so hops later, that small flow arrives at the address you mention.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, check that diagram out.
I'm biased, but I think it does a pretty good job of allowing us to unravel bitcoin flows.
