> If you have hashes co-located with data, and data spread throughout the chain, it is not a merkle tree. Yes that's the theoretical structure but in practice

> If you have hashes co-located with data, and data spread throughout the chain, it is not a merkle tree. Yes that's the theoretical structure but in practice its usage almost always implies data co-located with the intermediate hashes, if only because it's used to validate the integrity of a tree of files and directory and it's easier to manipulate a single structure with all the information. That's how it's done in Git internally, as well as in IPFS for example. I believe it's also how Merke-trees are used in some backup/synchronization tools. > In a blockchain, for any given block, there is only one valid next block. Yes, but that's just a particular kind of tree, where each node only has one child.