Sort of — the trust in the network is reduced to: 1. I trust nobody has >50% of the hashing power. 2. I trust network participants to be economically r

Sort of — the trust in the network is reduced to: 1. I trust nobody has >50% of the hashing power. 2. I trust network participants to be economically rational actors This is both a much smaller, and much more explicit, set of things you need to trust than regular banking. At any rate, the bigger point is that the a16z post describes trust as a positive, whereas the correct attitude is to treat trust as a negative quality of a system. Cryptocurrencies are not designed to engender trust, they're designed to avoid it wherever possible.