According to Don and Alex Tapscott, authors of Blockchain Revolution (2016),

The blockchain is the database of all transactions that have happened since the beginning of time. In the blockchain world, this is known as the genesis block. The blockchain is duplicated all over the world. Once a transaction of something appears in the blockchain, it is very easy to prove it exists.

In this world, miners are entities whose only goal in life is to insert a transaction into the blockchain. To be efficient, miners try to update batches of transactions into a block. Other nodes confirm that this new block obeys all rules set forth in the Bitcoin protocol. Once a miner inserts an update into the blockchain, all transactions inside that block are considered confirmed. At this point, you have a row in a database that can never be erased.

That means basically that blockchain technology, originally created for Bitcoin, can really be used for any kind of transaction, and the digital-technology community is catching on to that fast. A blockchain can be thought of as a decentralized database that is managed by distributed computers on a peer-to-peer network. Each peer maintains a copy of the ledge to prevent a single point of failure. Updates and copying are reflected across all peers simultaneously.