"Also I didnt mean to suggest the wild west was some kind of ideal/balanced place. As funny as it would be, I’m not an Anarchist haha. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go there, and I wouldn’t ever live their myself. But that doesn’t mean I want it wiped from the plane of existence. I if I could put physical files there, and know they were beyond the touch of any company or government, then I would want it to exist. I think it has utility, which can be used to defend against evil dictators and corrupt democracies as well as be used to support evil though black markets."
I don't think you really want this, even though you say you do. "Being beyond the touch of companies and governments" comes with two caveats: firstly, you're not beyond their touch (it's a lot easier for a company to control a blockchain than it is for a company to control a government or any other system), and secondly, I think you have forgotten what the wild west scenario *is*.
It's not like a blockchain means your files are safe and happy and nobody can touch them. Developer rug pulls, a group of malicious users with high voting power deciding that your files actually belong to them, and myriad other problems exist; much like the Wild West, nobody wins, because even if they're safe for a small period you will eventually be compromised by a bigger entity. That's why it is called the Wild West, and why we started making centralised systems like the law.
Blockchains are a fantastically easy way, in fact, for the "evil dictators and corrupt democracies" you are worried about to compromise your assets. Why go to all the trouble of having to try and force through legislation, or justify military operations, when you can compromise a blockchain or a user's login to a blockchain access website instead? Way easier. If you really want your files to be "beyond" such touches, you should advocate for stronger legal regulation, not decentralised systems. They are decentralised in name only - large companies and governments would come to control them much more easily, you just wouldn't know about it.
"I don’t quite follow the Zuckberg argument yet. Are you saying that in an ideal democracy 51% of people could regulate out the 0.0001%? (In contrast to a significantly less than 51%-of-the-voting-population group with 51% of the wealth)"
No. I'm saying that web3 doesn't give you what you think it does. It actually makes it far easier for a Zuckerberg or similar person to control things; unlike Facebook where he has to submit all kinds of public reports, go through public scrutiny and legal regulation, in web3 he can do whatever he likes and nobody can stop him, even if they want to. Only an insane person would consider that an improvement on any existing system. Your mistake here is to think that an "unregulatable" system is good, when in fact, it's terrible.
The whole reason we started having laws and centralised authority is because if you don't, the richest and most powerful entities have no barriers to control of anything. Yes, centralised authority has flaws - largely due to propaganda by certain politicians and so forth making voters vote stupidly - but decentralisation just means Zuckerberg, or anyone else, gets a 100% free pass. If that's really what you want, I would question your sanity.
"I’m sorry I don’t understand the PGP example yet either. Doesn’t the bob-alice example work the same in web2? If you mean certificate authorities are the difference, I already trust giving people my key directly more than having a certificate authority hold it on my behalf."
Unless you plan on living like a hermit, rarely trading the occasional webpage with a passing trader, you don't really get to operate on a "I trust giving people my key" system. More importantly, your trust is seriously misplaced.
In web2, a compromised certificate authority could result in problems, and has done before. In web3 you literally can't trust any key at all, because you don't know it belongs to the user you are talking to. I suggest you read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_authentication . In web3 there is no such thing as a certificate authority, so man in the middle attacks are trivial. You need centralised authority or security quite simply doesn't work.
"Hey! See! We do agree 😄 I’m okay with all those things for the decentralized web, and I agree all of those are going to be downsides. I also agree streaming is also extremely important, which is why I think WebRTC is an absolutely critical component for the decentralized web."
Those two sentences completely contradict each other. You can't have even remotely reliable streaming with a decentralised service: what do you do when a peer stops transmitting? It's not obligated to serve you content. You can try to connect to another but it's going to result in a horrible streaming experience; on top of that streaming is expensive. You should look into the history of why advertising is so prevalent on the web today; things like say, Twitch or Netflix require gigantic amounts of bandwidth to function, and that isn't free, not to mention other requirements. Decentralised actors have zero incentive to provide that to you, and since you can't regulate them, they're free to charge you as much they want or misuse their position as much as they want.
"With your concern for the 51% issue, does this mean you’re against the existence of all proof of work and proof of stake blockchains? (I didn’t realize that, if that is the case)"
Yes, not only because of this, but because they quite simply don't work. On top of that, the idea that they "decentralise" anything is laughable: it is much easier for rich entities to control these than it is for them to control anything else.
As an aside, I wrote a far longer article about all of these issues here, if you want further reading. It goes into a lot of detail about blockchain functionality, web security, etc. https://antsstyle.medium.com/why-nfts-are-bad-the-long-version-2c16dae145e2
