BITCOIN
FIELD NOTES

SHOW NOTES Both blockchain forensics and AI interpretability promise transparency but deliver something more fragile: data you can see, but meaning you can only approximate through heuristics. This episode explores what that convergence reveals about bu

SHOW NOTES Taint analysis is the quantitative framework that determines whether funds are frozen, whether a transaction is flagged, and ultimately which assets get recovered in investigations. But it's also one of the most misunderstood methodologies i

In research across 900+ days of Bitcoin transaction data, one pattern showed up in 33% of traced laundering flows — more than CoinJoin mixing, more than exchange deposits, more than anything else. It's called the peel chain. And it also appears in cou

In Episode 2 of Bitcoin Heuristics — Field Notes, we get into flow tracing: the methodology behind every major crypto investigation you've heard of, from Colonial Pipeline to Silk Road. It's powerful. It's also one of the easiest places in this field

If you've ever read that the FBI "traced" a Bitcoin ransomware payment, you've already trusted the Common-Input-Ownership Heuristic — the single assumption that turned Bitcoin from an opaque transaction graph into a forensic map. It's how the FBI buil