Merkle Trees: How to Verify a Thousand Signatures with Just 100 Bits

From One Seed to a Thousand Leaves – Merkle's Authentication Tree

In 1979, Ralph Merkle introduced tree authentication to solve the storage problem of Lamport-Diffie one-time signatures. By organizing public keys into a binary tree and sharing only the root, Alice can sign up to eight messages while Bob stores just a single hash value. This article explains the Lamport-Diffie scheme, its vulnerability to forgery, and how Merkle's tree reduces storage from gigabytes to 100 bits.