[Cryptography] actual journalism, was LRB article, Satoshi's Trump Card

[Ron Garret]

[Removing cipherpunks from the cc list since I am not a subscriber]

On Jul 3, 2017, at 1:59 AM, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

> On 03/07/2017 4:31 PM, Ben Laurie wrote:
>> Confused by this - Merkle trees inherently don't grow to enormous depth.
> 
> The bitcoin hash chain grows to enormous depth, and arguably it is a Merkle tree that testifies to all transactions everywhere that ever taken place in bitcoin.
> 
> If you say it is not a Merkle tree, then fine.  A scalable crypto currency has to employ a Merkle trees instead of whatever we call the thing that Bitcoin uses.

The original bitcoin paper by Satoshi (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) explicitly dealt with this issue in section 7, and specifically says:

"Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash.”

What happened?

rg