That was precisely my point. The overwhelming majority of people don't look at one line of code. It'd be better to say that they do trust, just not blindly. There's always a degree of trust, even the programmers need to trust their coding skills for proper verification.

The good thing with writing open-source software is that you're broadcasting your statement in public, and everyone is able to join, read your work and extend it. Add to the equation that there's competition among privacy services, therefore incentive for your competitors to find exploits in your code, and you have another game theory; you cannot afford to write bad software in public.

But that's under normal circumstances. When there's cooperation with the enemy, childish responses from developers for our concerns, the head of Wasabi doxxing his competitors and examples of Wasabi coinjoins reusing addresses (were accessible from KYCP.org, but it's taken down), then I don't care about the software. I've simply lost trust.

He handled it terribly. Avoiding the questions, mocking users with a mixer signature, being pro-censorship, and as the icing to the cake, wished death to another fellow user he disagreed with.

Red flags for a privacy service.