Welcome to Constraints
Constraints, episode 0
Every investigation hits a point where the evidence runs out. The graph ends. The wallet has no owner. What’s left looks like too little to know anything. That is where the real work starts, because the question is no longer where the money went. It is whether anything here can be known at all.
The answer almost always has the same shape: what can this system not do, even if it wanted to?
In a system built to hide the truth, the truth rarely stays visible. It survives as constraints: things the system cannot violate without contradicting itself. Balances must reconcile. Code executes exactly as written. Every transaction requires authorization and fees. When direct evidence disappears, constraints remain, and they are often enough.
That is what this newsletter is about. It isn’t blockchain news, and it isn’t a bag of tricks, though you may pick up and share a few. Real investigative dynamics from actual cases will appear throughout. I won’t avoid them, but they are only examples, and I may run out of good ones. What we’re really doing is looking at the reasoning underneath them.
I’ll keep the language plain and lean on examples. Nothing simplified, only explained. I’ll assume only an understanding of blockchains and about three or four minutes of your attention per episode (probably a better investment than the usual LinkedIn AI-digested motivational slop).
The same move shows up far beyond blockchain: in law, intelligence, engineering, economics and more. Different fields, one method: when you can’t see the answer, you rebuild the question from what couldn’t have been otherwise.
My hope is to make this a place where investigators, analysts, lawyers, developers, and anyone drawn to systems can exchange ideas grounded in that way of thinking. Not because these fields share answers, but because they share the same attitude: how to know something when everything is built to stop you. And in the conversations I hope will grow in the comments, I’ll ask the same of you: keep it plain, so people from different fields, with different vocabularies, can still understand one another.
This is an epistemic problem before it is a technical one. A problem about what can be known, not about blockchain.
If you’re starting today, begin with the episodes that came before this one:
Episode -4: Inside Inferno Drainer. How shared criminal infrastructure becomes the very thing that identifies its users.
Episode -3: A Special Demixing Case. Following the money failed. Arithmetic didn’t.
Episode -2: Wallet Balances. How a single screenshot identified a wallet holding millions.
Episode -1: Guess Who? (On-chain). Finding a wallet from nothing but an NFT profile picture.
The negative numbers are LinkedIn’s doing: newsletters can’t time-travel, so older articles were filed as Episodes -4 through -1. I call it a feature.
New episodes follow a weekly cadence, typically on Wednesdays at 9:30 CET. Episodes are published only when they meet a required threshold of insight quality; otherwise, publication is deferred.
Next up: Episode #1: What a USDT Recovery Actually Looks Like.
Before we return to reasoning from constraints, let’s spend one episode looking under the hood of a USDT recovery. We’ll follow the on-chain footprints of a paradox: an asset moving on a decentralized network that ultimately answers to a single authority.
Let’s meet where the evidence ends.