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.
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.