Proving Without Revealing: Merkle Trees for Event-Sourced Systems
Imagine it's January 2026. You run a platform with millions of users. An auditor walks in with a specific request: "Show me proof that you captured a GDPR consent event for user #12847 on March 15th, 2024." You know the event exists – it's sitting in your event store. But here's the problem: you can't just hand over your complete event log. That log contains millions of events with sensitive customer data, financial transactions, business secrets, and personal information from thousands of other users.