The newsroom reading list: primary sources we rely on

Why primary sources

Both of our beats generate a vast amount of commentary and a much smaller amount of original material. New reporters at Web3News are handed a reading list in their first week, and almost everything on it is a primary source. The reasoning is practical. A reporter who has read the actual regulation can tell within a paragraph whether a press release is describing it accurately.

This is that list, lightly edited.

For the crypto desk

• The Bitcoin white paper. Nine pages, published in 2008, and still the clearest statement of the problem proof of work was designed to solve. Most arguments about Bitcoin are easier to follow afterwards.
• The Ethereum white paper and the official developer documentation. The documentation on accounts, gas and transactions is the fastest route to reading a block explorer properly.
• The text of the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. Long, but the definitions and the titles covering stablecoins repay the effort. Summaries routinely get the scope wrong.
• Stablecoin reserve attestations. Reading several in a row teaches what is and is not being attested, and how to spot a change in wording.
• Post-mortems of major protocol exploits. Well-written incident reports from security firms and the affected teams are the best education available in smart-contract risk.
• Central bank and standard-setter papers. Reports from the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board are sceptical in tone and rigorous in method, which makes them a useful counterweight to industry material.

For the iGaming desk

• The licence conditions and codes of practice of a strict regulator. The Gambling Commission's rulebook for Great Britain is the usual starting point. It shows what detailed obligations on customer interaction and fair terms look like.
• Regulatory enforcement decisions. Public statements setting out why an operator was fined explain, in concrete terms, how compliance fails in practice.
• Annual reports of listed operators and suppliers. The segment notes and risk sections explain the economics of the industry better than any conference panel.
• Test laboratory standards for random number generators and game mathematics. Dry, and essential for anyone who will write about RTP or fairness.
• Peer-reviewed research on gambling harm and the evaluation of safer gambling tools. We ask reporters to read the studies and not the summaries issued by either industry bodies or campaign groups.

For everyone

A basic statistics text. A large share of the errors we catch in copy are statistical: confusing a percentage with a percentage point, reading a small sample as a trend, or treating correlation as cause. Both desks deal in probabilities every day, and we would like to get them right.

An open list

The list changes as rules and technology change. If there is a primary source you think every reporter on these beats should read, the newsroom address is on the contact page.