Yeah, ultimately there is only one reason to use what people are calling "a blockchain", and that is when the system requires global unrestricted membership, where anybody can spin up any number of new nodes at any time if they want to. This is rare.

That one requirement is what triggers a exponential spray of additional features and complexity and tradeoffs, each one designed to curb the worst security-risks or performance-issues from the previous step until you get something not-too-horrible.

When you relax that requirement, everything can be reduced to a dramatically simpler, faster, easier-to-manage system, which often qualifies as a "traditional" distributed database.

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For example, take election voting records. Nobody actually needs to allow infinite/random nodes to pop up anywhere at any time simply to "Dude I saw that too" the data.

"Blockchain" proposals all carry serious risks, like: People losing their vote because they didn't stay at the polls for an hour to confirm that it went through and re-vote if it didn't; Some foreign government declaring their own National Botnet Day to fuck it up; Your own government pre-emptively investing bajillions in a short-term "defensive" CPU mob that you might not be able to trust either; etc.

In contrast, a far saner traditional approach: The election already relies on authorities for voter-rolls and candidate-choice. So have each US state runs 3-5 DB nodes, blend in 50 nodes from federal government agencies. That small networkof 200-300 computers get preloaded with one-another's public keys and IP addresses. The only other computers they need talk to are the ones reporting from respective state polling sites.

Safety comes from the fact that any attack (record tampering or plain day-ruining sabotage) would require an attacker to simultaneously hack, corrupt, or destroy many different groups/locations simultaneously, which is pretty unlikely. The system would be dramatically faster, cheaper, easier to audit, better able to tolerate local polling site connection outages, etc.

...Buuuut it doesn't drive the cryptocurrency PR hype machine. I'm OK with that.