Think for yourself and question everything.

Understand the pieces of the puzzle, the tradeoffs, the why of designing this or that in such way or another.

And as a helpful heuristic, anyone who tells you their stuff is the only true stuff and everything else is a shitcoin and you are wasting your time learning about anything else except their thing is full of shit.

You don't need to become a world-class cryptographer. At some point you'll need to trust certain assumptions.

But even then you can select for open-source, peer-reviewed, etc.

Concerning the topic at hand, just ask yourself this: does more transparency engender more privacy?

And does less privacy engender more freedom and personal autonomy?

Think long and hard about it. Those are some pretty relevant questions today.