I just read about MMRs on the website:
I now understand how they work, but I still don’t understant why they’re desirable over standard merkle trees or patricia merkle tries. Can someone explain the tradeoffs?
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Merkle trees are defined for static sets of data. They don’t support incremental addition of new data.
MMRs are dynamic Merkle trees that efficiently support appending new data (changing only a logarithmic number of internal nodes).
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Ahh, interesting. Does this mean you could append to the set and compute the new peaks knowing only the peaks of the prior range? That is brilliant.
Yes, appending only manipulates peaks of full binary merkle trees.
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