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That's a Merkle tree. Blockchains are a Merkle tree plus some form of consensus algorithm, often a trustless one. It's the usefulness of the consensus algorithm
by rcxdude 3y ago
That's a Merkle tree. Blockchains are a Merkle tree plus some form of consensus algorithm, often a trustless one. It's the usefulness of the consensus algorithm which is usually called into question by critics (generally because it's often expensive and cannot reference anything outside the system).
- r3trohack3r 3y agoIIUC a merkle tree is a data structure where the leaf nodes are the hashes of data. The inner nodes of the tree are hashes of the child hashes up to a root hash. Merkle trees are helpful for quickly validating the integrity of a chunked file. Both IPFS and BitTorrent use merkle trees to validate files. I do not understand how git could represent its history using a merkle tree.
- nextaccountic 3y agogit commits themselves are merkle trees (or more like, DAGs) that contain filesystem trees, a set of parent commits, and metadata each parent commit in turn contains their own parents etc, until you reach an initial commit the funny thing here is that parent commits don't have references to children, it's children that have references to parents (like the union find data structure) so the relationship here is inverted. that's because git objects are immutable