Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal: Authenticated prefix trees

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 05:48:26 -0500

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 05:47:52PM -0800, Mark Friedenbach wrote:
> This BIP describes the authenticated prefix tree and its many
> variations in terms of its serialized representation. Additional BIPs
> describe the application of authenticated prefix trees to such
> applications as committed indices, document time-stamping, and merged
> mining.

Could you expand more on how prefix trees could be used for
time-stamping and merged mining?

>     >>> dict = AuthTree()
>     >>> dict['Curie'] = VARINT(1898)
>     >>> dict('Einstein') = VARINT(1905)
>     >>> dict['Fleming'] = VARINT(1928)
>     >>> dict['中本'] = VARINT(2009)

I'd be inclined to leave the unicode out of the code examples as many
editors and shells still don't copy-and-paste it nicely. Using it in BIP
documents themselves is fine and often has advantages re: typesetting,
but using it in crypto examples like this just makes it harder to
reproduce the results by hand unnecessarily.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
0000000000000002d7a0c56ae2c5b2b3322d5017cfef847455d4d86a6bc12280