Where money grows on trees

Quote of day "Money does not grow on trees"

We have all heard the expression money does not grow on trees. Well it does in bitcoin, on Merkle trees! Let me explain. I do not mean you get money for free. Merkle here, refers to Ralph Merkle, he is a computer scientist, co-inventor of public key cryptography and inventor of the Merkle tree. A Merkle root is a method to abbreviate a lot of data into a single “hash” or abbreviation. It has many advantages, like being able to extract a single piece of data from the hash without revealing all the data in the data set. In a block in the bitcoin blockchain, all the transactions are abbreviated, or reduced to a Merkle root. If you deploy or elaborate the Merkle root, you will get a Merkle tree and you will see all the bitcoin transactions in the block. So if you think bitcoin is money, then “Money grows on Merkle trees.”

I recently attended the conference “Surfin Bitcoin” in Biarritz. I had the sentence “Money grows on Merkle trees” printed on a T-shirt of my podcast “The Swiss Road to Crypto” and people came up to me saying “what a great sentence!”. That is one reason why I loved the conference.