Root Causes 686: Why Merkle Trees need mirrors

In this episode about Merkle trees and cryptographic mirrors, Jason and Tim discuss Jason's hands-on experiment building an RFC-compliant Merkle tree to log autonomous AI actions and keep AI systems tamper-evident. They explain how binary hash pairing works from leaf events up to the root hash, uncover how an attacker or misaligned agent could silently prune unpaired trailing branches without invalidating the root math, and show why independent mirrors run by CAs, browsers, and infrastructure providers are essential to Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs).