As a total newbie to bitcoin and blockchain am trying to understand how everyone these days claim that they are going (or are already) utilizing "the blockchain" for their business needs that's not currency related. When I look at Bitcoin I see a wallet address and another wallet address and some decimal value like 1.056012 that is transfered from one to the other, that's it! So how on earth do people claim they use the blockchain to store values of anything that's not currency related on there? How would a place store their inventory or customer database or even loyalty tokens or a voting system or anything else on this blockchain that seems to have become this mutlti use desentralized trust system. My only conclusion is that there must be another blockchain or another "coin", but for every app and even then, where would they get thousands and thousands of people to mine this coin with it's own rules? What a mission that must be! If you have to employ thousands of nodes to do the mining for you then it becomes centralized again since you pay people to mine it.
Unless I am wrong and people DO use the basic bitcoin blockchain for other things. I can imagine if one uses the bitcoin blockchain and lets say you have a voting app (Clinton versus Trump) then you would have one Address for Clinton and one for Trump and everytime someone votes for his/her candidate a very very small micro payment will go the the address they voted for, but what if some clever person got hold of the address and then simply deposits a large amount into it, messing up the whole system? Surely you cannot stop someone from sending coins to an address?
I don't get how the blockchain is used for anything but bitcoins - please enlighten me
