Well, sorta. The same thing could be accomplished with literally any other form of database. The problem isn’t “there’s never been blockchain”, it’s “there’s never been a database.”

Blockchain is extremely flawed, from a database perspective. The biggest issues with it are that people think it ensures entries are correct, and that people think you can read data out of it effectively. To the first, it doesn’t. It ensures that data is valid but to a computer, valid and correct are not synonyms. To the second, you can only get data out of a blockchain if it’s unpopular. As soon as a blockchain gets used, it grows and grows and grows, and becomes unmanageably complex. Simply reading information out of it and entering new information onto it becomes computationally ridiculous.

The true value of blockchain has nothing to do with the technology. The real value is the hype itself. Because of all the hype, blockchain is effectively tricking companies and industries to implement standardized databasing systems that they’ve been resisting for decades.