In his Turing Award Lecture Reflections on Trusting Trust in 1984, Ken Thompson explained, for the first time, an attack vector against open source code that allowed introducing perfectly undetectable backdoors by compromising compilers. The attack vector can be explained in simple terms for the layman to understand it, which I will do in a moment. What makes it of particular interest, however, is that today there is widespread ignorance of its nature among the founders/creators of cryptocurrencies that aim to be decentralized and private. As delicately and non-offensively as possible, we’ve got to ask ourselves an important question. Can the minds of those who do not understand a well-documented attack vector like compiler risk, design a censorship resistant and private crypto economic system? That’s a question every reader must, after careful reading, decide for themselves.