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Comment by fergazen | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting, thanks. I had never heard of Merkle Tree. Since a linked list is merely a special case of a 'tree structure' (i.e. one where there is always only one child), we can consider Merkle to be the true 'inventor' of blockchain. However, really the concept is so simple and obvious that I wouldn't be surprised if Babbage/Lovelace era folks had written papers on it.

I'm sure there's at least one arse who'll tell me the DIFFERENCE between a tree and a linked list. lol. Gotta love social media.

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A linked list is a special case of a tree structure, but a blockchain is not a special case of a Merkle tree. If you considered the special case of a Merkle tree that was just a list it would be both useless, and not a blockchain.

Edit: Its worth pointing out that the main innovation of the 2008 paper by Nakamoto introducing the concept of blockchain's wasn't just storing things in a linked list based on hashes. It was the Sybil tolerant distributed consensus algorithm. Most people include that in the definition of a blockchain.

He'd also be the true inventor of Git then. It's a widely useful data structure.

Merkel WAS a genuine innovation, and it DOES collapse into plain blockchain if all 'nodes' on a given tree have one child, because in this case the directed graph (tree) is a linked list. If the key innovation in both structures were not the same then your snarkyness would have been appropriate.

The point is that there is more to blockchain technology than just Merkle trees, I think. Just focussing on the underlying datastructure is like saying filesystems are just B trees or something.

Yes. I think that there a bunch of interesting ideas in blockchain technology, not all of which are necessarily new, but they are often new to the blog writer and/or audience. So introductory articles often focus on those basic concepts, which leads to this confusion

The Wikipedia article on blockchain has this sentence: "From the technical point of view a blockchain is a hashchain inside another hashchain", and that sums it up. The actual blockchain algorithm itself is as simple as that. Period. Full stop.

Of course, most actual APPLICATIONS of blockchain also ADD ON a lot of other concepts, like distributed ledger, distributed consensus, etc. Trust me, i'm not the guy in this conversation confusing algorithms with applications.

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