The spirit of Bitcoin is to trust no one and nothing. If that can't be accomplished in practice due to things like interfacing with the real world, you might as well use Stellar and save yourself a lot of mining.
The article talks about starting groups of trusted companies, setting up barriers to entry etc etc, in order to build trust. These are authorities.
Arguably Bitcoin is already dependent on trust - collusion between pool operators is entirely possible, they and the developers have already shown that they are an authority (when the various forks and merges have happened).
A crypto-currency with an authority can be done in such a way that mining is unnecessary.
Bitcoin isn't about distrust. It's about decentralized trust as that is the primary function of the blockchain. Bitcoin as an ecosystem hasn't been about distrust, but decentralized trust, and it has long been moving away from decentralization, which is fundamentally problematic.
In microcosm it demonstrates something I've often thought about libertarian proposals for government-less societies - in fairly short order a class of barons will appear and we're back to feudalism of a sort.