>Let's say you have a bunch of files in your ~/Documents folder, some public, some private. Run merkdir on the directory, and you get a root hash which anonymously represents all your documents. Now you can publish that, sign it, timestamp it, whatever you like.
Maybe I'm the wrong audience for this, but I don't know what this means.
I feel like the Github README stops one or two steps short of explaining how this tool is useful for a real-world task.
Another use case might be an organization that has a large archive of important files. This tool allows them to efficiently sign all of these files by signing the root hash.
Edit: added this to the README
That makes it more concrete. Thanks!
>Another use case might be an organization that has a large archive of important files. This tool allows them to efficiently sign all of these files by signing the root hash.
This one, I'm still a bit confused. Sign them for what purpose?
If they're signing a bunch of documents to vouch for their authenticity, don't they have to cryptographically hash all the documents anyway? Or is the idea that instead of hash+sign N documents, they hash N documents, but they only have to sign one thing?
Plus the size of signatures can really add up depending on the number of files and algo.