Yup, the spirit of Bitcoin, at least its original spirit, was total distrust, with no authorities needed or wanted, and it was designed specifically to fulfil this function.

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.