Bitcoin didn’t start in 2009.
You can trace its story back to 1979, when Ralph Merkle designed a #cryptographic data structure that would become one of #Bitcoin’s core building blocks: the #MerkleTree.
Merkle first documented the idea in his thesis and patent. It wasn’t until CRYPTO ’87, an academic conference on advances in cryptology, that the work began to get broader recognition. From idea to spotlight took almost a decade.
By the mid-1990s, Merkle trees were in production. One of the best examples: Surety, a company that hashed client documents into a Merkle tree and published the root hash in the New York Times classifieds each week, anchoring data integrity in full public view.
Years later, when #SatoshiNakamoto needed a way to structure Bitcoin blocks that was both efficient and tamper-evident, he chose Merkle trees.
In the #BitcoinWhitepaper, all transactions in a block are hashed into a Merkle tree, with only the Merkle root included in the block header. This keeps blocks compact and makes verification straightforward.
Satoshi also noted that old blocks could be compacted by pruning spent transactions. Combined with Merkle proofs, this design choice enabled light clients to verify transactions without downloading full blocks, critical for Bitcoin’s scalability and global accessibility.
Ralph Merkle likely imagined many applications for his invention, but he couldn’t have foreseen that his “tree” would help secure a trillion-dollar network. By extracting strong security guarantees from simple hashing, he gave Bitcoin a scalable root of trust.
The artwork “Merkle Trees and the Roots of Trust” by Gina Choy pays tribute to this chapter of Bitcoin’s history. It appears in the History of Bitcoin Collector’s Book and on our interactive timeline.
📖 We’re telling Bitcoin’s origin story one building block at a time.
Follow History of Bitcoin / Smashtoshi for more chapters from the early days of cryptography, cypherpunks and digital money.
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History of Bitcoin
Merkle Trees and Roots of Trust
Merkle Trees, invented by Ralph Merkle in 1979, power Bitcoin’s secure and scalable blockchain by efficiently verifying and organizing transactio...