Comment Re:Smelling more fishy every day. (Score 1) 227
So just how easy is it to look up the transaction records for 200,000 bitcoins, anyhow?
Pretty easy, since a complete record of every bitcoin transaction ever is available for every user of the software. It's called the "Block Chain", where a "block" is a set of transactions that have a hash generated to validate the contents, and they are chained by also including the hash of the previous block as data in the following block. Thus any changes (data corruption or malicious) become evident by re-hashing the block and comparing it to the value stored in the next one.
The Block Chain is shared across a peer-to-peer network among running copies of the software, so that everyone gets a constantly updated copy as new blocks are added.
Your terminology is incorrect, though. Bitcoins don't have transactions. Addresses have transactions, whose amount is measured in bitcoins. But the addresses are indexed for the Block Chain data, and it is fairly trivial to look up all the transactions for a given address. There is even an online website you can look it up without having to download a full copy: https://blockchain.info/addres... (these are transactions for the address in the last part of the URL).
You just need to know the addresses associated with the "found" 200,000 BTC.