Patricia Tries
If you’re not familiar with Merkle Trees, read the previous article to give you a basic idea of what Merkle Trees are, why they’re useful, and give you a glimpse of the significant advantages of Merkle Patricia Trees over standard Merkle Trees. Merkle trees are a fundamental part of what makes blockchains tick. Although it is definitely theoretically possible to make a blockchain without Merkle trees, simply by creating giant block headers that directly contain every transaction, doing so poses large scalability challenges that arguably puts the ability to trustlessly use blockchains out of the reach of all but the most powerful computers in the long term. Thanks to Merkle trees, it is possible to build Ethereum nodes that run on all computers and laptops large and small, smart phones, and even internet of things devices. Unlike transaction history, however, the state needs to be frequently updated: the balance and nonce of accounts is often changed, and what’s more, new ...