>>715624373Yes, you will always be dependent on the decisions of others when you're making exchanges with an intermediary. But there are nuances.
For example, if the intermediary is an authoritarian or fundamentalist government, it would probably be worse than Visa and Mastercard, since transaction blocks would become basically arbitrary and unpredictable.
A more open government would probably be less bad, since it couldn't block any kind of legal transaction. Keep in mind that Mastercard can block anything it sees as harmful to its business and interests. So, let's say you have a company that is offering a service that has the potential to free people from Mastercard. This company can simply blacklist you and force you to be left with basically no monetization options. It doesn't matter if what you were doing was legal, Mastercard no longer wants to work with you, and you are basically left with no viable options.
An open and democratic government could not, in theory, do something like that. But we know that utopia does not exist. A system operated by the US government, for example, would 100% certainly block some transactions considered "anti-Semitic", for example...