A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it – something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is “decentralized.” Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because much of the power held by large companies (and by governments) comes from the fact that they operate and control databases. Facebook alone gets to decide who can read and write from their database and what parts of it anyone can see. They alone can make changes to this database. This turns out to be the source of Facebook’s power in the world. Many people rightly see this power as a problem, but fail to see how the structure of the original web technology directly contributed to this extreme centralization.