Its true there is still some need for someone to have access to a bank or someone to physically bring in bitcoin to a country. But with services such as localbitcoins where you can find people near you to trade cash for bitcoin and bitcoin ATMs(not usually run by banks) you can get pretty far without a bank.
Ok, so who operates localbitcoins? How do we know they’re not just funneling us to a set of local agents that have really high prices?
The replacement of “centralized trust” is not “trust anyone”. But I’m still not convinced any decentralized trust systems available today can deal with the governance problem: Who gets to make the rules, and why them?
We’ve just replaced the relatively-transparent Federal Reserve with a group of shady mining company CEOs controlling core whose main cash flow is likely laundering drug money (we don’t know for sure though because they don’t ask questions). I don’t think that’s an improvement for transparency.
"relatively-transparent Federal Reserve" - thats crap. All bitcoin are open to see and track and all the code is open source and you can start mining if you want to, albeit at a loss. The federal reserve is the opposite of transparent.
Bitcoin (used as a proxy for the block gain/cryptocoin in general) does not remove the need for banks or financial governance. It is simply a new mechanism through which a bank could be built; but governments can (and should/will) pass laws regulating it.