The first sentence of the Bitcoin white paper describes a problem that can't be solved by a normal DB.
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
> "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
Except it failed completely at that. The blockchain has proven through real world use that it is unusable as a currency. By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.
> By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.
1. This is far from proven. Scaling is definitely a problem, but I don't think it's at all been proven to be impossible.
2. You still have to admit that bitcoin has solved this problem at a small scale, which isn't nothing. Transactions without a trusted central authority are literally impossible with previous technologies.
But that problem isn't solved by Bitcoin (not can it be solved by any digital currency); Bitcoin doesn't allow online payments to be sent from one party to another without the need for third party clearance, it just increases the number of parties required for clearance.
Then please list some useful, concrete applications of blockchain that would not be solved better and cheaper by a normal database.