Merkle Trees in Blockchain: Simplified Overview

Merkle Trees in Blockchain, also known as Hash Tree, are a fundamental part of the given technology and consist of hashes of different blocks of data. It aids in verifying the data's consistency and enables the encoding of blockchain data more securely. Today's article will teach us all about "Merkle Tree" in the blockchain. In our previous article, we learned about "Ricardian Contracts in Blockchain", which you can check out here. So what are we waiting for? Let's get started!?

What is Merkle Tree in Blockchain??

Merkle Trees, or hash trees in blockchain, are mathematical data structures made up of hashes of various data blocks summarizing a block's transactions.?Merkle Trees, or binary hash trees in blockchain, are mathematical data structures made up of hashes of various data blocks summarizing a block's transactions. A Merkle Tree database is used to distribute blockchain data in such a way that it is not stolen, lost, or damaged. It also generates a digital fingerprint of all the data of the given blockchain network by carrying the total of all the transactions. Merkle trees are made from bottom to up by making use of Transaction IDs, which are hashes of each transaction.??

Know All About Merkle Root?

To understand Merkle Root, let's take an example of four transactions namely M, N, O, and P respectively. Each of these transactions is hashed as Hash M, Hash N, Hash O, and Hash P. These hashes are paired then as Hash MN, and Hash OP. Now a Merkle Root is created by combing these two as Hash MNOP. The image below is just a simple depiction of a Merkle Tree, but in fact, in reality, it is much more complex and refined.??

How do Merkle Trees Work??

As mentioned before, a Merkle Tree is made to fragment the given data into manageable chunks of data by splitting it into leaf nodes. A Merkle Tree summarizes all transactions and is created by hashing varied pairs of nodes to the point when only one node remains, known as "Merkle Root" or Root Hash. It is significant to note that each non-leaf node is a hash of its previous hash.?

Founder of Merkle Trees

Merkle Tree is proposed and named after a renowned computer scientist known for his work on public key cryptography, Ralph Merkle. He proposed Merkle Trees in the 1987 paper "A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function" and also invented cryptographic hashing. He patented the idea of Merkle Trees in 1979 and both Bitcoin and Ethereum use such tree structures.??

Benefits of Merkle Trees in Blockchain

We can understand the benefits of Merkle Trees from the pointers explained below:

• Maintains integrity: It maintains the integrity of the data because even a minor change to the blockchain is reflected in the hash of that given transaction.?
• Maintains Validity: It ensures the validity of the blockchain data by maintaining a digital fingerprint of the same.??
• Saves Storage: It saves storage space and disk memory as proofs making transactions computationally faster and easier.?
• Information Distribution: Merkle trees can be divided into tiny pieces of information across the given network.?
• Easy Verification: It takes only a few moments to verify the data's integrity and the data format is quite efficient.?

Use Cases of Merkle Trees

After understanding the benefits of Merkle Trees, it's time to get in touch with the use cases of Merkle Trees in Blockchain. The significance of Merkle Trees is evident in the fact that without it, the users would have to retain a complete copy of each transaction that happened ever. It doesn't sound like an optimal solution but rather a problem that is easily solved by the core concept of Merkle Trees. Let's get onto the use cases of Merkle Trees in Blockchain.?

1. Amazon DynamoDB and Apache Cassandra use it for the process of data replication and control discrepancy.??
2. Interplanetary File System, a peer-to-peer distributed protocol.
3. Git is one of the widely used distributed version control systems used by programmers around the world to manage projects.?
4. It is also used to generate verifiable certificate transparency logs.

Conclusion

Merkle Trees is indeed a significant part of the Blockchain in today's newsletter, I tried to give you a simplified overview of the same, along with its working, benefits, use cases, and more. They have proved to be highly useful for cryptocurrency platforms and make verification quite a time-saving process through the entire network of the blockchain.?