How I learned about Merklix trees (without having to become a cryptocurrency enthusiast)

In my distributed systems course a couple weeks ago, we were discussing how the anti-entropy mechanism in the Dynamo key-value store uses Merkle trees to efficiently compare the data stored on different replicas. The idea is this: suppose that two replicas (on different physical machines, perhaps on opposite sides of the planet) are each storing some large number of key-value pairs. Suppose you want to make sure that the values of the keys on replica A are the same as those of the correspondin...

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