BITCOIN
FIELD NOTES

EPISODE DESCRIPTION In the middle of Bitcoin's documented security budget crisis, something unexpected happened: people started paying unprecedented amounts in transaction fees for images, JSON tokens, and protocols Satoshi never designed for. This epi

EPISODE DESCRIPTION Bitcoin's theoretical security budget problem meets real-world energy economics as AI data centers systematically outbid Bitcoin miners for the same electricity. This episode traces the displacement happening across hashrate, geograp

BITCOIN HEURISTICS — FIELD NOTES Episode 9: The Security Budget Cliff — Why Bitcoin's Mining Revenue is Disappearing on Schedule EPISODE DESCRIPTION ================================================ Bitcoin's block subsidy halves every four years o

Bitcoin's Thermostat: A Dyson Sphere Mines the Same 450 BTC/Day Popular narrative: Bitcoin converts energy into money—fiat leaks to inflation, Bitcoin preserves value via real energy. Physically wrong. Bitcoins are ledger entries; SHA-256 dissipates e

EPISODE DESCRIPTION Bitcoin advocacy focuses on technical privacy solutions—CoinJoin, atomic swaps, confidential transactions. But most users will never adopt them. Meanwhile, the actual privacy that protects ordinary Bitcoin transactions has almost n

Bitcoin's ledger is transparent, but it's also ambiguous. Every transaction where you spend more than you send creates a puzzle: which output is the payment, and which is the change? Change address detection is the second-most critical heuristic in fore

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