US Patent 7831573 System and method for committing to a set

The disclosed embodiments relate to a system and method of committing to a data set, comprising forming a directed acyclic graph adapted to encode the data set, the directed acyclic graph having a plurality of pointers and a plurality of nodes wherein at least one node has multiple parents, the directed acyclic graph having at least one root node and a plurality of leaf nodes. Further, disclosed embodiments comprise committing to the directed acyclic graph to produce a committed-to data set and producing a plurality of proofs about the committed-to data set such that a combination of the plurality of proofs does not reveal information about which nodes have multiple parents, each proof comprising a trace from one of the plurality of nodes to at least one different node, the trace comprising the identities of the nodes and pointers traversed.