Diving into Merkel Trees
summary
Builds a working Merkle tree in Elixir modules for Leaf, Node and MerkleTree using a cryptographic hash function, turns four file blocks l1–l4 into leaves, and shows recursive chunking to compute the root. Demonstrates Merkle audit proof verification for single-block downloads and an anti-entropy repair between replicas where replica three receives l2 to match replica two. Shows copy‑on‑write efficiency: updating l4 creates only three new nodes and a new root, not a full copy.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker intro
- 1:36Origins of Merkle trees
- 4:14What are Merkle trees
- 5:43One-way hash functions
- 7:51One-time signatures
- 10:40Computing Merkle roots
- 11:50Building Merkle trees in Elixir
- 15:47Handling larger data sets
- 19:51Merkle audit proofs
- 21:39Real-world use cases
- 22:00Distributed systems consistency
- 24:31Peer-to-peer file sharing
- 26:19Copy-on-write data structures
- 28:49Summary and key takeaways
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