# Merkle Trees

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Bitcoin makes extensive use of Merkle Trees. A Merkle Tree is a binary tree structure (meaning its branches terminate in two nodes) that's made entirely of hashes. For example, the leaf nodes at the bottom layer of the Merkle trees used in Bitcoin are the hash values of the raw data from bitcoin transactions. And the successive layers of the tree leading back to the root node are constructed by concatenating the two hashes from the previous layer, and hashing them together to form a new hash. This has the effect of connecting the tree together to be represented securely by one single root node value. This structure makes it very easy to find data at the bottom of the tree, as well as to prove specific data exists in the tree - which is particularly important for scaling the Bitcoin system efficiently.


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