ELI5: How do Merkle Trees actually work?

[verifyas]

You hear about them alot on technical crypto forums, and maybe in a Vitalik speech .. but what the heck are they?

Well, we dug under the covers and wrote up a post about it just for you:
https://medium.com/@verify.as/merkle-trees-simple-yet-powerful-4c44dad19539

Feedback welcome!

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[FuzzyQuant]

That was an informative article! Thanks for putting in the time for this.

A follow-up post on how forks work (soft-forks and hard-forks) would be pretty timely

And I'm sure it would answer a lot of people's questions these days!

Keep it up, this is the kind of content we need.

[verifyas]

Thanks, we've added that to the list of topics! Will send you a note when it's out.

[FuzzyQuant]

Thanks, we've added that to the list of topics! Will send you a note when it's out.

Awesome! Thanks for that, I'll be on the lookout.

[logosobscura]

This is brilliant- I've had to explain this to people using a whiteboard and I've just ended up with blank expressions. Bookmarked, and will be shared- you've just got yourself a regular reader, keep up the good work.

[verifyas]

This is brilliant- I've had to explain this to people using a whiteboard and I've just ended up with blank expressions. Bookmarked, and will be shared- you've just got yourself a regular reader, keep up the good work.

Thank you for the kind words!

[stackholio]

Excellent article, thank you for taking the time to write this up! One cool example of conveying the hash-of-a-hash idea is the color-mixing theory found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SMliFtoPn8 . It helped us understand the idea of the new hash being a mix of the previous effectively. You could include that same concept in your visualization!

A follow-up post on how forks work (soft-forks and hard-forks) would be pretty timely

I agree!

[verifyas]

Excellent article, thank you for taking the time to write this up! One cool example of conveying the hash-of-a-hash idea is the color-mixing theory found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SMliFtoPn8 . It helped us understand the idea of the new hash being a mix of the previous effectively. You could include that same concept in your visualization!

Great idea, thanks for the suggestion!

A follow-up post on how forks work (soft-forks and hard-forks) would be pretty timely

Already on it

[floaks]

Nice article, keep up the good work!

Other good (technical) source is https://www.iaik.tugraz.at/content/research/opensource/merkle_tree/ and https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2848504&preflayout=tabs.
Check their Github page.