Blockchain is a very interesting topic and can offer solutions to solve data integrity assurance. As an Idea not new at all. It has become famous mostly because of crypto currencies, even though the data mining, which is a highly focused topic along crypto currencies, is not part of the blockchain technique. Datamining is only the try to secure a public hosted blockchain. Securing is important, because even if you have all your data in a blockchain and you can prove their integrity without a doubt, you need still to trust the source, otherwise a complete chain could be replaced, with the target to exchange one single link in the middle. As long as you have proper security and monitoring mechanisms in place, Blockchain is an extremely powerful technique to ensure sequential data integrity, like the sourcing chain of a product, historical data persistence and so on. On the other hand, from a privacy protection point of view, blockchain can be a disadvantage, because as it is designed, it's not possible to exchange data in the middle, for example removing a name from a complete blockchain.
The blockchain technique is an easy implementable solution to beat audit, regulatory and data security requests at once and implement human readable interfaces.
