Okay.

Indelibility is a feature, not a drawback. Here, watch:

In an example like a corrupt government office keeping track of deeds, there’s literally no additional difficulty entering a false record that results from any aspect of blockchain.

Arthur and Bob share a field. At some point in the distant past, Bob's grandpa said Arthur's grandpa could have the pond but never wrote it down. Bob reminded Arthur of this right about the time catfish got expensive and Arthur decided maybe catfish farming was a good idea. They go to Charlie, the local government clerk. Charlie will give the pond to whoever gives his son a better job. et voila it's Arthur's pond and Charlie's son David gets to sit on his ass drinking Red Bull for five catfish a day.

Fast forward two years and the catfish market is bust. Arthur no longer wants to pay Daniel five catfish a day because they aren't worth the price of raising. Charlie goes to Bob and lets it be known that land records are variable and poof, Arthur is out of a pond.

Let's put a blockchain on it

Daniel is still getting his five catfish a day, but now GriftChain records that parcel 12345 went to Arthur as recorded by Charlie on 12/31/45. If Charlie wants to resell it to Bob, we need Arthur to be a party to the transaction. For that matter, Bob can bring up the transaction to Frank, the regional auditor, to point out that the initial transaction was corrupt, invalidating the whole thing. It's no longer Charlie's word against Bob, it's there in the GriftChain ledger. And Arthur can see this, Bob can see this, Charlie can see this, Daniel can see this, Frank can see this, and anything that gets recorded is recorded forever and is unfalsifiable.

I've got like four SQL databases on my network. They all corrupt with appalling regularity. I can tweak the shit out of them whenever I want. Their principle utility is not their inviolability, it's their ability to reorganize and query a large dataset. If you want inviolable data, you pay more for that: I was messing with that shit back in 2000 for tracking photos and ownership and edit history and revision control is not the same thing as consensus.

Yeah - you can falsify records. But the false records are forever. The fraud is there... forever. The fraud can be reversed with another transaction, blockchain isn't Vaal the god computer, but the address that falsified it is identified forever, too. If you have a credential that allows you access to the blockchain, and you use that credential to enter false data, every other transaction you made with that credential is now subject to audit. In order to get away with it, you have to get away with it forever. it doesn't make crime impossible, but it radically alters the economics of forgery to the point where for a broad sector of goods it will no longer be economically viable.

I have never once called blockchain anything a silver bullet. Ask mk, it took him a good two years to get me to come around on the very idea of it. There are lots of technologies that are solutions in search of a problem. Blockchain is a solution in search of an implementation which is another matter entirely. No, there's absolutely no point in putting your deed on Bitcoin, it moves impossibly slowly and what the fuck is the point. Bitcoin is a black market instrument through and through.

But it's not "just a database." And reducing it to such will never improve your grasp of it.