What are Merkle trees for, and why can’t blocks do without them? Don’t worry, your class rep is here:
The Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) described in Section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper uses Merkle paths to let lightweight clients verify transactions without downloading the entire block.
The advantage of a Merkle tree is that a single short root hash can “lock in” a large number of transactions, and any change to even one of them will be exposed.
The old me: dive in and figure it out later. The me now: read the manual.
$BTC 80808 (+0.57%)
#BTC
The Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) described in Section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper uses Merkle paths to let lightweight clients verify transactions without downloading the entire block.
The advantage of a Merkle tree is that a single short root hash can “lock in” a large number of transactions, and any change to even one of them will be exposed.
The old me: dive in and figure it out later. The me now: read the manual.
$BTC 80808 (+0.57%)
#BTC
