Merkle Tree
| A Merkle tree, also known as a hash tree, is a tree in which every "leaf" is labeled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node is labeled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Merkle trees are used in computer science to verify the authenticity of data stored in a data structure, such as a file or a database. In a Merkle tree, each leaf node is labeled with the cryptographic hash of the data block it represents. In addition, each non-leaf node is labeled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. This allows anyone who knows the label of the root node to verify the authenticity of the data stored in the tree. Merkle trees are named after their inventor, Ralph Merkle, who first described them in a paper published in 1978. |
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