Merkle tree
Have you heard about Merkle trees when discussing blockchain technology? That’s because the Merkle tree is at the core of the technology itself. What is Merkle Tree A Merkle tree, also defined as a binary hash tree, is a data structure used to efficiently summarize and validate large data sets. It is a tree structure in which each leaf node is a hash of a block of data, and each non-leaf node is a hash of its children. Typically, Merkle trees have a branching factor of 2, meaning that each node has up to 2 children. Merkle trees are used in distributed systems for efficient data verification. They are efficient because they use hashes instead of full files. Hashes are ways of encoding files that are much smaller than the actual file itself. Currently, their main uses are in peer-to-peer networks such as Tor, Bitcoin, and Git. Overview The Merkle Tree has been all over the place since 1979 when there was a man named Ralph Merkle at Stanford University. Merkle wrote a paper t