Whilst most of the people only began to study "blockchain" due to Bitcoin, its roots - and applications - go much deeper than that. Blockchain may be a technology unto itself. It powers Bitcoin, and is actually the rationale why so many new ICO's have flooded the market - creating an "ICO" is ridiculously easy (no barriers to entry). The point of the system is to make a decentralized database - which essentially means instead of counting on the likes of "Google" or "Microsoft" to store data, a network of computers (generally operated by individual people) are ready to act within the same way as a bigger company. To understand the implications of this (and thus where the technology could take industry) - you would like to see how the system works on a fundamental level. 

Created in 2008 (1 year before Bitcoin), it's an open-source software solution. this suggests its ASCII text file are often downloaded edited by anyone. However, it must be noted that the central "repository" can only be changed by particular individuals (so the "development" of the code isn't a free for all basically). The system works with what's referred to as a Merkle tree - a kind of knowledge graph that was created to supply versioned data access to computer systems. 

Reason being that the interesting thing about "crypto" is that - as especially evidenced by the likes of Ethereum - the varied systems which are built on top of it can actually be programmed to figure with a layer of logic. This logic is basically what IoT / Industry 4.0 has missed so far - and why many are watching "blockchain" (or an equivalent) to supply a base-level standard for the new ideas moving forward. This standard will provide companies with the power to make "decentralized" applications that empower intelligent machinery to make more flexible and effective manufacturing processes.