Elvis Presley (in a 1956 interview, when asked about his sudden fame and wealth):
“I don’t feel like I’ve earned all this money. I feel like I’m just holding it for somebody else.”
This is Freedom.
Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree, with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored.
#Bitcoin #Satoshi