HELP

Building a new node, planning to run latest Bitcoin Core (25.0) - never read any code from bitcoin core until now.

Looks like a massive codebase. I have rudimentary knowledge of C language. I'm clicking through a few pages of the code, wondering how can I trust a codebase I don't fully know. I guess trust is inevitable? Even in a "trustless" system?

Just the fact that it is open source, and *someone* would be double checking the DEVS?

Because what if an organization paid off all the Devs at simultaneously to plant a malicious code line deep in the code, that intelligently sabotages the security or efficacy in some intelligent, genius way, to critically or catastrophically damage the network? This is massively more practical and dangerous than the classic, infeasible "51% sustained attack".

On github it looks like literally only a handful of contributors doing the Lion's share of commits. Isn't this the most practical potential weakness of bitcoin? How can we mitigate as plebs? Is the only way to dedicate ourselves personally to reading the full code and grokking it entirely, as well as every release?

Or just run the release on my node and "trust"? Fuck, man. Is it more important to have a full node running asap (now) to be "sovereign and decentralized", and move on with other important projects, despite not having the months/years of firsthand code verification to really know it is free from potential malicious lines?

Like who has actually read the full code and understood it to gauge the integrity, besides those full-time devs on github?

Any thoughts appreciated...