I'm a lot more skeptical these days of anyone who asks you to accept their word on faith.
FC has never asked me anything, so I don't know wtf you are talking about. Does FC message you asking you to take his word on faith?
Isn't the point of Bitcoin the decentralization of trust? We're not supposed to have to trust individuals (or groups), because individuals (or groups) can be scammers. But here we are anyway.
some level of trust is always required for a transaction. Someone has to go first, even with an escrow.
I don't know how you run a security exchange without even a basic level of trust, at least of the software running the system (provided that you took out all humans along the way). I'm sure it exists, but every BTC exchange market requires you to at least trust the exchange itself.
Actually, there's some pretty cool discussion about using the Bitcoin protocol to enable trust-free exchanges with "colored coins".