Merklix tree for Bitcoin

Last summer, I had the opportunity to meet with the Bitcoin ABC folks, and we revisited the pain points which needlessly complicate on-chain scaling for Bitcoin. The Merkle tree flavor as originally implemented in the Satoshi’s codebase comes with its own complications, some of them clearly accidental - as they do introduce unintended vulnerabilities. The Merklix tree angle addresses the scalability challenge as well as fixing the unintended complications of the original design.

Abstract: The layout of the Merkle tree as originally found in Bitcoin does not lend itself to incremental embarrassingly parallel processing, which will become a hindrance if the blocks are to become large in the future. Thus, we propose the Merklix tree, a change of the Bitcoin consensus rule that impacts the hashing strategy for a block. The Merklix tree is a bitwise trie supplemented by a Merkle overlay. The Merklix tree lends itself to incremental embarrassingly parallel calculations, and it also maximally preserves the backward compatibility with the existing applicative landscape of Bitcoin.

PDF at https://blog.vermorel.com/pdf/merklix-tree-for-bitcoin-2018-07.pdf