Largely this question comes back to decentralization, trust, and a novel paradigm of digital ownership that is enabled by elliptic curve cryptography and blockchain tech.
The blockchain acts as a social consensus mechanism - we can all agree that "X public key owns Y unique token" - which is not the case with a centralized database record that can be mutated, or a file that can be easily copied/edited and shared.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27770605
Largely this question comes back to decentralization, trust, and a novel paradigm of digital ownership that is enabled by elliptic curve cryptography and blockchain tech.
The blockchain acts as a social consensus mechanism - we can all agree that "X public key owns Y unique token" - which is not the case with a centralized database record that can be mutated, or a file that can be easily copied/edited and shared.