I don't necessarily believe this myself, but here goes: A database under control of any one entity is prone to undue influence by hacking or bribing or other l

I don't necessarily believe this myself, but here goes: A database under control of any one entity is prone to undue influence by hacking or bribing or other leverage. An append-only database that is controlled by consensus of all club members is safe from malfeasance on the part of a minority. There is value in that. Of course this has nothing to do with mining coins and stuff. Now you can argue the society already solved these problems with rigorous administrative processes around existing databases. I would reply that blockchain-based process may end up being cheaper and/or faster to settle and reconcile. In the same way the computing previously done by humans was turned over to machines. It may have looked like the problem is under control and there is nothing to solve here, but it turned out there was a lot to be gained from dramatically increased computational power.