Plain Strata: One Hash for a Thousand Steps, What a Hash Tree Proves and What It Never Can
A town pins a tournament bracket of a thousand names along a hall wall, with a short mark worked out from each pair above them all the way up to one mark at the top, copies that single mark onto a card on the public noticeboard, and a week later settles an argument about player 438 by handing over the name and ten other marks, because the man checking can work upward and see whether his result matches the card, which is a hash tree (a way of sealing many pieces of data behind one fixed-length scramble called a hash, from the French hacher, to chop) and the reason a blockchain (a shared record…
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