[acdha]

> There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data

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.

[necovek]

Deletion and/or non-public is an interesting problem. Obviously, you can store it encrypted and delete the key, but advances in compute and algorithms might render that encryption breakable.

For data that needs to be updated, all you need is an override mechanism, which sounds simple enough.

[acdha]

Storing it encrypted also means you have to ask what happens if the key is leaked — for example, if I tried to sell movies that way rightsholders would be unlikely to accept a system where you could pay $10 and then give the decryption key to all of your friends, leaving me no way to revoke it.

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.