As we have clearly seen with OpenSea and rampant fakes, copies, plagiarism etc. Oh wait...
This is only true of the data stored on the blockchain itself. As described in the article, that isn’t anywhere near enough to replace the centralized systems being billed as “web3”, and it’s completely unworkable for data which can’t be public, which is updated frequently, or which needs to be deleted. Combined with blockchains being unavoidably quite expensive and slow, and the challenges of standardizing protocols while the competition is shipping it seems quite unlikely that this will change.
It doesn’t reduce lock-in meaningfully if Google were to continue to store and process all of your data but now you’re using an outside authentication system. I’m sure they would love, however, the way “web3” makes their job of tracking users so much easier.
For data that needs to be updated, all you need is an override mechanism, which sounds simple enough.
For updates, you can definitely replace things but that's expensive if you have to pay a transaction fee regularly and it could quickly get to non-trivial storage sizes if you have to store obsolete versions in perpetuity, especially with non-trivial metadata overhead.
We already see this with blockchain payments. The vast majority of merchants who accept cryptocurrency payment do so through a service that manages their wallet and typically offers some kind of value-added features to lock them in. There is no reason to believe the same will not happen with Web3, if it is not happening already.
for all of the reasons that web3 apologists are excited about decentralization. I'm not really one of them, so I'm not going to advocate on their behalf, but lots of people are very excited about this.
> It is almost always easier to have at least some central point of control
I don't think anyone is going to argue that decentralization is the easiest solution.
I agree that it's hard to remove this point of centralization once it's there. My guess would be that, if this goes the way many are hoping, new places emerge over time with increasing levels of independence from these central providers.
The point of blockchain was removing trust from a single person and spreading it around over a network
This actually proves the point that security is relative. There are instances when I would feel more secure when an outside party can refund my money, say when the seller never ships the product I ordered. There are also times when I would feel less secure with chargebacks, like when I sell something on eBay and the buyer files a complaint with PayPal after taking delivery of exactly what they ordered.
Security wasn't an original goal of bitcoin. Privacy, anonymity, and immutability were, though the first to were lost a decade ago and immutibly is pretty well solved but also the primary cause for so much wasted resource consumption.
Your comparative examples make no sense - you like refunds as a customer and hate refunds as a vendor.
Surprise, surprise…? I mean this is already the case in web2/fiat.
That’s just not true