Some tools and/or resources I use, recommend, or have created:
Line Goes Up is Dan Olson’s drop dead incredible video essay from the peak of the crypto boom at the end of 2021 that will never be topped as far as explaining how and why sociopolitical forces and criminals conspired to create something as demonic as crypto. It’s an excellent starter guide to the topic, containing incredibly effective layman’s answers to questions like “WTF is the difference between bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?”, “WTF is proof of work?”, and much, much more. Seriously one of the most entertaining and informative things you’ll ever watch on any topic, as its current 16 million recorded views can attest. You should watch it even if you don’t care about crypto. Olson also released kind of a follow up called The Future Is A Dead Mall that’s also well worth your time.
My DocumentCloud uploads. DocumentCloud is basically giant shared hard drive where journalists share things like court documents, invoices, receipts, and so on if they are or might plausibly be of interest to other journalists in the future. If I find a document that I think meets those criteria sometimes I remember to upload it (though unfortunately not always). DocumentCloud is not particularly well indexed by Google so it can be very interesting to search, though be aware that searching DocumentCloud is a little more complicated than running a Google search.
ClownSort: A hilariously (or poorly, depending on your thinking) named tool to index and sort large numbers of screenshots by the text they contain. Particularly useful for making screenshots of people being clowns on the internet easily locatable at a later date but can be used for less fun archival stuff too.
Arkham Intelligence is my go to blockchain research tool. While it is kind of useless for some kinds of analysis it is incredibly useful for others. Most importantly they have a truly impressive amount of addresses correctly tagged.
Molly White’s Web3 Is Going Just Great is an incredible running compilation of the various catastrophes that make up the the ongoing tsunami of fraud and cringe that is the cryptocurrency industry. It’s also the blog that inspired me to sign up for Substack and Twitter. Citation Needed is a separate blog she started for more long form journalism on the subject. They are both required reading. Follow The Crypto is a resource she put together to track money in crypto.
David Gerard and Amy Castor have been running Revenge Of The 50 Foot Blockchain, a crypto sceptic blog that also serves as a running compilation of major events, since the very earliest days of bitcoin. David is the most O.G. of crypto sceptics and to this date his “it can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong” is the greatest single sentence explanation of how to think about cryptocurrency every typed into the internet. They also now have an AI sceptic blog, fittingly titled Pivot To AI because most crypto bros have transmogrified themselves into AI bros.
Crypto Critics Corner is the best deep dive podcast on crypto scams. Protos is a crypto news site that the hosts write for.