I guess I long ago decided that Bitcoin was interesting enough with just the possibility of not having to rely on a central authority/entity.
More to the point, however, is that this isn't really an issue of an authority, but rather an issue of trust. If I for whatever reason decided not to trust Bitcoin.org, someone else could take their place. For instance, I could get my recent state of the block-chain from a pal that I trust to do the actual task of verifying the full chain. I could even pay that person some fee periodically for providing that service. You could probably come up with a distributed, fraud resistant, method of providing recent block chain states where many sources would have to be simultaneously compromised for any attack.
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I guess I long ago decided that Bitcoin was interesting enough with just the possibility of not having to rely on a central authority/entity.
More to the point, however, is that this isn't really an issue of an authority, but rather an issue of trust. If I for whatever reason decided not to trust Bitcoin.org, someone else could take their place. For instance, I could get my recent state of the block-chain from a pal that I trust to do the actual task of verifying the full chain. I could even pay that person some fee periodically for providing that service. You could probably come up with a distributed, fraud resistant, method of providing recent block chain states where many sources would have to be simultaneously compromised for any attack.