You have to pay many orders of magnitude more than simply using a database. In what way is it cheap? And, to what end? What [legal] problems can you solve with crypto that you cannot with a database?

If they wanted a simple, verifiable database, a public Merkel tree would suffice. A Git Repository with a list of balances would be more than sufficient, and verification of proof would be as simple as "walk the tree backwards" and verifying that they all summed up correctly at each step, plus some signatures required to touch your account negatively.

Bitcoin has never been about proof and verification; it's always been about the decentralized claim, but mostly as an excuse to give it a reason to exist.

> You have to pay many orders of magnitude more than simply using a database

"You" here is essential. For a participant in the blockchain, it's expensive. That's the cost of eager evaluation. For a non-participant just verifying, it's cheap. Cheaper than auditing bank records.

Ninety-nine percent of blockchain and web3 is easy-money folly. But there are technical advantages to the system. Had Hadoop had better marketers...

You both are wrong. From database point of view blockchains are multi-master, AP system with open set of masters (writers). The name of the game is censorship resistance. If some writers censor, I can pay non-censoring writer to include my tx.

You’re conflating computational expense with monetary expense.

The monetary expense is _much_ higher due to the need for redundancy.