> Can you give me an example of how a bit-flip would blow up a cryptographic merkle tree, but not blow up a non-cryptographic file system? Any bit changes anyw

> Can you give me an example of how a bit-flip would blow up a cryptographic merkle tree, but not blow up a non-cryptographic file system? Any bit changes anywhere in the merkle tree immediately destroy its ability to self-verify because the integrity is ruined. Basically the entire tree is dead because you can't add new nodes. Non-cryptographic file systems? A bit-flip changes 1-bit in an isolated place. That one place is ruined but can be easily recovered with checksums or strategies like RAID parity. Detection is harder, though. Either can be recovered at the block level, though. I use merkel trees as a solution for a project at work and it has brittleness issues related to data integrity and we have to solution specifically around it.