Are hashes of Merkle tree roots unique throughout whole blockchain? The &quot;Mastering Bitcoin&quot; book says that each block header contains a 32B long hash of the Merkle root for all the transactions it contains.
If I extract all these Merkle roots from all the blocks in the blockchain (longest branch only) and put them in a list, will that list have any duplicates?
The merkle root is a 32 byte hash.
As the hashing operation is sha256, it is exceedingly unlikely that you will find duplicates, but it is not, strictly speaking, impossible.