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.
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 titled “A Certified Digital Signature,” unknowingly creating a significant blockchain component. In his paper, Merkle gave a description of a brand new method of proof-making. Primarily, Merkle designed a data verification process that would allow computers to work much faster than before. Merkle’s idea, now called the Merkle Tree, has fundamentally changed the world of cryptography, including how encrypted computer protocols work. As a result, Merkle Trees has grown in popularity over the years, especially in cryptocurrency. Many cryptocurrencies like Ethereum have also embraced Merkle Trees.
Working of Merkle Trees
Why Merkle Trees are Essential to Blockchain
Uses
Importance
Cryptographic Hash Functions
Protocol
A Merkle tree sums up all transactions in a block by generating a digital fingerprint of the whole set of operations, allowing the user to check whether a transaction is included in a block. Merkle trees are created by repetitively hashing pairs of nodes until only one hash is left, this hash is better called the Merkle Root or the Root Hash. They are constructed from the bottom, from the hashes of individual transactions called Transaction IDs.
The leaf nodes are the lowest tier of nodes in the tree. At first, it may sound difficult to comprehend, but if you look at the commonly used figure below, it will become much easier to understand.
An example of a binary hash tree, Image from Wikipedia
Why Merkle Trees are Essential to Blockchain
if Bitcoin didn’t have Merkle Trees, every node on the network would need to maintain a full copy of every transaction that has ever happened on Bitcoin. You can imagine how much information it would have been. Any authentication request on Bitcoin would take an incredibly large packet of data to be sent over the network, so you need to have it on your own to verify the data. A computer used for validation would have to use a lot of processing power to compare ledgers to ensure that there were no changes. Merkle Trees fix this problem. They hash records in the accounting, which efficiently segregates the data proof from the data itself. Proving that a transaction is valid only includes giving small amounts of information across the network.
Merkle trees have three main advantages:
- They provide a means of proving the integrity and validity of the data
- They require little memory or disk space, as the evidence is computationally straightforward and fast.
- Their evidence and management only require a small amount of information to be transmitted over the network.
Merkle Trees are vital because they make Merkle proof possible.
In the world of Blockchain, this means that Merkle Trees provides the following critical features:
- Ability to verify that a transaction is included in a block
- Light-clients
- Full efficiency and scalability
- Simplified Payment Authentication
Blockchain Council Merkle Tree
Simply put, a hash function is any function that is used to map data of an arbitrary size (input) to a fixed size output. A hashing algorithm is applied to the data input and the resulting fixed length output is referred to as the hash.
With systems that contain massive amounts of data, the benefits of being able to store and identify data with a fixed length output can create vast storage savings and help to increase efficiency.
Within blockchains, hashing algorithms are used to determine the state of the blockchain.
Blockchains are linked lists that contain data and a hash pointer that points to the previous block, creating a chain of connected blocks, hence the name “blockchain”.
Each block is connected to each other through a hash pointer, which is the hash of the data inside the previous block along with the address of the previous block. By linking blocks of data in this format, each resulting hash of the previous block represents the entire state of the blockchain since all of the hashed data of the previous blocks is hashed into one hash.
In various distributed and peer-to-peer systems, data verification is very important. This is because the same data exists in multiple locations. So, if a piece of data is changed in one location, it's important that data is changed everywhere.
The protocol goes like this:
- Computer A sends a hash of the file to computer B.
- Computer B checks that hash against the root of the Merkle tree.
- If there is no difference, we're done! Otherwise, go to step 4.
- If there is a difference in a single hash, computer B will request the roots of the two subtrees of that hash.
- Computer A creates the necessary hashes and sends them back to computer B.
- Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you've found the data blocks(s) that are inconsistent. It's possible to find more than one data block that is wrong because there might be more than one error in the data.
Note that each time a hash is found to match, we need nnn more comparisons at the next level, where nnn is the branching factor of the tree.
Web 3.0 Satoshi Nakamoto Cryptocurrency Ethereum NFT Merkle Tree El-Salvador eNaira
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