[SkyMarshal]

>All you get from the Bitcoin blockchain is the ability to store some public data that's hard for anybody to alter once the data has settled. That's useful for a few special problems, but not widely useful.

You get more than that, you get a new social trust and consensus model that has never before existed. Eg, the ability for an indefinite number of anonymous, mutually untrusting participants to nevertheless agree on the state of a continually updating communal data source.

The tech is still in alpha stages, but is potentially powerful, and hence isn't cheap in terms of resources, and it shouldn't be. In fact, the big question and ultimate objective now is, is it possible to make the consensus system even more secure at the cost of even less efficiency?