Ask HN: What if blockchain was invented before centralized databases?

It was.

Paper ledgers.

If you write the current transaction so it overlaps the previous line, you even have some of the collective tamper proofing benefits.

In some ways it was! Blockchain is (in essence) a signed ledger of double-sided transactions (that happens do be duplicated for error/fraud checking). The first part of that (ledger of double-sided transactions) has been around since the 13th century, and been replicated is almost all accounting software.

read up on the PICK database and operating system.. blockchain is for children compared to what we did with PICK..