You have the right to your belief. I find comfort in the math and the fact that there are a lot of eyes on Monero's code. Any "privileged access" to Monero's code would found and be patched immediately.

"The founder defended Monero’s cryptography, saying he could not assist the government with “privileged access.” He said, “I have no privileged access to Monero’s code, GitHub repo, website, Twitter account, DNS records, donated funds, or anything else.”" 

 For sure. I don't doubt the code, I doubt the person. 

 You're contradicting yourself. You're the one who mentioned not trusting Monero (code) because of a person. If you don't doubt the code, why does that person influence your trust of Monero? That doesn't make sense. 

 Has an unprecedented amount of insight into the chain and could assist the feds in deobfuscation techniques, etc.

I still stand by what I said.  

 You don't understand Monero or why the math matters. 

 I suggest reading these:

https://github.com/insight-decentralized-consensus-lab/post-quantum-monero

https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/1495/what-privacy-issues-did-monero-have-and-still-has/1496

 

 tldr: clear net monero protocol has a known open attack vectors 

 The last link is almost 8 years old...all issues have been long addressed with RingCT, enforced default ring size, etc with FCMP++ around the corner resolving any remaining issues with rings 

 I treat this the same way I do influencer accusations that Satoshi Nakamoto was actually a CIA agent. The code is open with lots of very smart privacy advocates eyes on it who develop it in a way that it is dev greed and sabotage proof. That's the beautiful thing about cryptography, math doesn't rely on trust or lie. 

 Exactly. It doesn't really matter who created it. Disappearing is one of the best things Satoshi did. Humans focus too much on people rather than ideas and fundamental principles. 

 how many nodes are running? mining? 

 https://monero.fail/map

https://bitnodes.io/ 

 the second one is about Bitcoin not monero 

 Yes, I know, I just included for comparison