An interesting study shows that bitcoin’s price movements have a predictive power over the price action of the dollar against most popular trading pairs. Fiction, they ask, or could this…
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Welcome back to our weekly update report, we have a number of exciting project updates and new developments this week. So let’s get started.
We are proud to announce that we will be official sponsors at Consensus 2018, The 4th annual blockchain technology summit being held in New York . Join us and over 4000 other attendees on from May 14th until the 16th at New York Hilton Midtown right next to the famous neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen.
Consensus is now widely considered to be one of the foremost annual blockchain events and frequented by high-profile cryptocurrency projects as well as known industry giants such as Deloitte, Microsoft, and many more. Drop by our stand
Our team have been working hard on a brand new overhaul of the front page of our site, incorporating a more user friendly interface. The new version is better and simpler, suited for casual viewers and the often forgotten ‘non-coiners’ (those who have not used cryptocurrencies just yet).
We are designing the new page with SEO and branding in mind, and it looks even better than before. However, there is still a lot to do before it is ready for deployment, and you can expect the final version to be live within the next 2–3 weeks on our all-time favorite url:
Arriving directly from our CTO and exalted Chieftan of Code Martin Szyllo, today’s development update provides a short summary of what has been happening in the modular engine room at Plutus. This week we have:
updated our Tap & Pay for Android to a new versionimproved KYC flow for easier verificationenhanced admin panel allowing for speedier query resolution for our usersimproved our load balancersprogressed closer to the release of the Plutus app for iOS
Our Head of Marketing Peter Panayi has been lining up media mentions left and right, successfully boosting visibility for Plutus in the process. So far we have been in contact with CIO review, Verdict Magazine, FSTech, and a few more.
We are also negotiating with a leading PR agencies within the finance industry that have achieved a great global presences for their clients and have outstanding accolades for their success. We are now at the final stages of appointing a PR agency, we will be announcing more over the next few updates.
Need to know what happens when it happens? Head over to our official Updates are shared live and you’ll have the chance to interact with both members of the community as well as the Plutus team itself. (Please keep in mind, only those with an “ADMIN” title are part of the team.)
If you have any questions or suggestions, reach out to us on .
Sincerely,
Plutus
I know it sounds complicated, but bear with me, it’s worth it.
A Merkle Tree is a data structure that is very useful in distributed scenarios because it allows you to securely verify data structures without having to transfer the entire data structure.
Examples
Thes use cases have been exploding in recent years:
Distributed Version Control (Git/Mercurial)BitTorrentCopy-On-Write Filesystems (btrfs/)Distributed NoSQL Databases (Cassandra, Riak, Dynamo)The distributed web! ()Cryptos (bitcoin, )
These all use Merkle trees to ensure data consistency.
Merkle Structure
The structure of a Merkle Tree “is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the hash of a data block and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes”¹
The parts of the Merkle tree are the branches (lines between nodes), the nodes, and the root (the very top node).
The hashes 0–0 and 0–1 are the hash values of the data blocks (data chunks) L1 and L2 respectively. The hash 0 is a concatenation of the hashes 0–0 and 0–1 and so on. By walking this tree, one is able to verify that a data chunk actually exists!
I still don’t get it, why are they used exactly?
Why Use Merkle Trees?
There must be good reasons why the use of Merkle Trees have exploded in recent years. Let’s list them now!
They allow you to securely verify a data structure! ZFS uses this to ensure that data stored is actually consistent with earlier versions of data.They significantly reduce the size of data you need to prove the consistency of data. bitcoin “light clients” only need to download block headers for each block in its blockchain instead of the entire block in order to verify its integrity. This is the main reason why they’re being used in distributed applications.It separates the verification of the data from the data itself. Cassandra DB’s AntiEntropy service uses Merkle Trees to detect inconsistencies in data between replicas because they don’t have to send the data itself across replicas for verification, only hash data.What kind of Proofs are there?
There are two Merkle Proofs that allow you to verify Merkle data in different ways.
Audit Proof: This kind of proof lets you verify that a single chunk actually exists in the tree.Consistency Proof: This kind of proof is only applicable to append-only Merkle trees. It lets you verify that earlier versions of the tree are consistent with newer versions of the tree, that they’re in the same order, and that all new records come after all old records.
For more information about the specific implementation of these proofs you can reference .
Hopefully you now understand a little better the uses cases for Merkle Trees in distributed applications. Enjoy!
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