IIUC a merkle tree is a data structure where the leaf nodes are the hashes of data. The inner nodes of the tree are hashes of the child hashes up to a root hash.
Merkle trees are helpful for quickly validating the integrity of a chunked file. Both IPFS and BitTorrent use merkle trees to validate files.
I do not understand how git could represent its history using a merkle tree.
git commits themselves are merkle trees (or more like, DAGs) that contain filesystem trees, a set of parent commits, and metadata
each parent commit in turn contains their own parents etc, until you reach an initial commit
the funny thing here is that parent commits don't have references to children, it's children that have references to parents (like the union find data structure) so the relationship here is inverted. that's because git objects are immutable
Merkle trees are helpful for quickly validating the integrity of a chunked file. Both IPFS and BitTorrent use merkle trees to validate files.
I do not understand how git could represent its history using a merkle tree.