Keep up with the happenings in the tech world without all the boosterism. Cryptocurrency critic, technology researcher, and software engineer Molly White publishes Citation Needed, a newsletter that features regular explainers of developments in the cryptocurrency industry, with summaries of the latest disasters featured on her well-known project Web3 is Going Just Great. The newsletter also features deep dives into important events in the technology industry, with added critical context that is too often missing.
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All content is free and available to all readers, and will continue to be that way. Paywalls suck and you won’t find them here. What you receive will be exactly the same regardless of whether you choose to pay for a subscription or not.
That said, paid subscribers are crucial to allowing me to continue doing this kind of research and writing, and so if you are able to support my work I would be immensely grateful. You will also get access to additional features including commenting.
I understand that not everyone is willing or able to support at the same rate, so I’ve set up a system to allow you to pay what you want. The suggested rate is $10/month or $100/year, which comes out to around $2.50 a newsletter. But whatever you want to or can afford to pay is just fine with me, and deeply appreciated.
If you really love my work, there’s also a founding member option where you can pledge a custom amount for an annual subscription. This is also a great option if you happen to have, say, an employer-sponsored reading or education budget.
Who is Molly?
Molly White is a researcher, software engineer, and prominent critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects. She is best known for her website Web3 is Going Just Great, which documents only some of the many disasters in the cryptocurrency and web3 industries, and for her Follow the Crypto election spending tracker.
White's dryly funny, almost clinical write-ups of crypto crises make it accessible even to open-minded skeptics like myself.
Molly White [is] a remarkable young woman who is the sanest critic of the crypto frenzy. By day, she’s a software developer and a dedicated editor of Wikipedia… In her spare time, she’s become the sharpest critic of crypto boosterism on the web.
Years spent online researching esoteric Internet cultures have made White a rare figure who can maneuver the technically complex, meme-filled world of crypto, translating it into digestible prose.
Molly White [is] one of the best critics of tech-boosterism...
This website and newsletter is built with the open source Ghost software, and hosted by Molly White (more details). Additional cloud services are generously provided by Fastly through their Fast Forward program.
Besides brief quotations or interviews (which are clearly marked), all writing in this newsletter is by Molly White. She does not use AI tools to generate the writing or images in the newsletter (except when writing about AI and including examples of its output, which is clearly marked).
Please read Molly’s disclosures for her writing about cryptocurrency.