The novel thing about blockchains isn’t the Merkle tree, it’s the mechanism that’s used to “secure” the tree against double spends. And that algorithm is indee

The novel thing about blockchains isn’t the Merkle tree, it’s the mechanism that’s used to “secure” the tree against double spends. And that algorithm is indeed novel! It also has a lot of drawbacks that ultimately makes the whole system not worth the trouble.