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Lecture

Merkle Trees

• A powerful data structure to improve our protocol's scalability

Slides

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Ch3.3 Overview

Merkle Trees

• A hash of a hash of a hash of a hash... of all the data until there's just 1 hash - the "root" of the tree. A guy named Ralph Merkle invented this as a data structure.

Merkle Proof / Branch

• The set of hashes in a merkle tree necessary to verify that a piece of data is within the merkle tree. This allows you to verify the integrity of a piece of data within a data set by checking much less than the full set of data. This is what light clients on Ethereum or Bitcoin do.

Recommended Resources

Wikipedia: Merkle Tree - Wikipedia page on Merkle trees.

Brilliant: Merkle Tree - Free page explaining merkle trees.

Pegasys: Ethereum Explained - Explains Merkle trees in the context of Ethereum.