The whole "decentralized" stuff doesn't really apply to much else outside bitcoin. All the others, including Ethereum, would not be saved by their "decentralized" nature if and when a government would like to crack down.

Take ethereum for instance, you don't need more than a couple of fun games like cryptokitties to basically make the network unusable for all practical purposes.

For steemit it is even easier: you just take down the first 20 witnesses, heck, you just take down the steemit inc.-run node, huff and puff a couple of times angrily and the network will experience a near-death experince. It will become clear that the 200 other witnesses have nowhere near enough computing power lined up to sustain a steemit with about 60 000 daily users. What it will be when the network will grow to 600 000 daily users ? Remind me how many daily active users FB has ?

That is to say that the best chance we have not to be "government controlled" is to ... control the government. Unfortunately if we take the US for instance, their brand of democracy appears pretty contaminated by money to a point where one cannot be sure that it will recover.

That is markedly less the case in many continental european democracies. Not that the "moneyed interests" are kept at bay but my personal opinion is that they wield significantly less power over the political process