Understanding Merkle Trees 🌳

Merkle trees are a crucial concept in computer science, especially in blockchain and file verification systems. Let's break it down.

What is a Merkle Tree?

A Merkle tree is a binary tree where:

• Leaf Nodes: Represent the cryptographic hash of a block of data (like a file).
• Non-Leaf Nodes: Represent the cryptographic hash of its child nodes.

This structure allows you to verify the integrity of a large dataset by only knowing a small part of the tree (the root).

How Merkle Trees Work

1. Hash Each Data Block: Each file or data block is hashed using a cryptographic hash function.
2. Build the Tree: Pairs of hashes are concatenated and hashed together to form the next level of the tree.
3. Root Hash: The process continues until there is only one hash left, known as the root hash.

Why Use Merkle Trees?

• Data Integrity: You can verify the integrity of any file by comparing the calculated hash with the stored root hash.
• Efficiency: You only need to store and compute the hashes of small parts of the data, making it efficient.

Example

Here's a simple visual representation:

      Root Hash
        /   \
      A       B
     / \     / \
    H1 H2   H3 H4

Each H is a hash of the data, and A and B are hashes of H1 + H2 and H3 + H4, respectively.