“Bitcoin is a bit of a paradox. It can be used nearly anonymously: any two people can easily set up brand new Bitcoin wallets, meet in a park (archived link), and exchange cash for Bitcoin. But at the same time, Bitcoin trades are public: all transactions are shared in a publicly available file called the Blockchain that’s posted to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. That public ledger makes it pretty tough for big-time criminals to launder money through the network. At least that’s what researchers at the University of California and George Mason University found when they studied the Bitcoin network by developing sophisticated tools to track how money was moving around it.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/bitocoin_anonymity/
