These are good questions. The short answer is that the blockchain offers several benefits over a traditional payment system like allowing the people mining the

These are good questions. The short answer is that the blockchain offers several benefits over a traditional payment system like allowing the people mining the content to be guaranteed payment (no matter what) and helping to preserve privacy in those paying for it. Such benefits would be very hard to provide if everything was done using a traditional financial system, not to mention the fees could potentially be quite prohibitive. With something like a peer-to-peer network you also gain the power to scale up and locate content over the Internet more quickly than something like a few data centers might give you (which may not be as distributed as running a peer-to-peer network of retrieval agents for searching disparate data sets.) The benefits are more pronounced for running datachains for controversial content where a distributed, incentivized ledger can help preserve the intended purpose (and chain of content) far better than entrusted everything to a centralized organization or list of computers. Admittedly, there are lot of bizarre projects in the blockchain space at the moment, so I'll keep thinking about whether this truly makes sense to do in practice.