Merkle Helps Rebuild Our World of Trust — Again!

You can call it what you want … blockchain or DLT … I only see the Merkle Tree and public key signing. But we now face a major problem in that the methods which are used to sign for transactions on the blockchain are at risk from the rise of quantum computers. We thus need signing methods which will not be cracked in a post-quantum computing world. And, so, again, we turn to the genius of Ralph Merkle, and his Merkle Tree.

Merkle signatures

The roots of hash-based methods is Merkle trees, and which are a way of hashing used in many applications, including with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Git distribution systems, No SQL, and P2P file transfer. With a Merkle tree we take our data elements, and then hash them, and take pairs of these hashes to create a new hash, and so we build a hierarchical tree. At the top of the tree is the root element (in this case Hash1234):

In this way, we can use the tree to see if we have matching data on systems. On a P2P network, we can transfer a file by splitting it into data segments and then distributing these segments across the network. A trusted source will have the complete Merkle tree for rebuilding the…