Hold up. That's really reductive. It isn't just a merkle tree. It's a merkle tree that you can look at and say "this merkle tree would cost 2 billion dollars to forge." This is valuable because if someone hands you one, you can tell if you're looking at a fake.
I didn't say Bitcoin is just a Merkle tree. My point is that Bitcoin is a system that combines different pre-existing components - like Merkle trees and Proof-of-Work - in a novel way, but people then split that system, and call those components "blockchain". Some user here in HN actually wrote "Git is a blockchain".
But the best example is that nonsense of "permissioned blockchains".
icebraining's claim is that Satoshi did invent something, but the thing he invented was not Merkle trees.
If you have an application where forging or forking the tree isn't meaningful (e.g., any possible Certificate Transparency Merkle tree can be merged at any point into any other one), then the thing that Satoshi invented is not useful to you, and having it cost $2 billion to build such a Merkle tree is a waste.
