Turns out all of us trusted and none of us verified, me included, but I’m retarded and never pretended I could verify anything. I almost lost all my bitcoin.
Since 2021, any of us could have and should have found this. However, this is more damning for some than it is for others. Especially all of the influencers who were shilling for and sponsored by coinkite. Turns out they trusted and verified the least.
The Bitcoin community has long repeated “don’t trust, verify” and “open source means anyone can audit it.” In practice, very few people actually do the hard, unglamorous work of deep code review.
Most people end up trusting the reputation, the marketing, the open-source badge, and the fact that “smart people must have looked at it.”