Before the tournament starts, I will publish a single 32-byte Merkle root to the Bitcoin blockchain. This hash cryptographically commits to every one of the trillion brackets, proving the dataset existed before any games were played.
A Merkle root is a single hash that represents an entire dataset. If even one bit of data changes, the root completely changes. By publishing this root to Bitcoin before the tournament, I prove that all brackets were generated in advance — no changes possible after tip-off.
If verification of a specific bracket is necessary ("best bracket ever" or "perfect bracket" occur), I will publish the 8 MiB chunk and the rest of the Merkle tree for verification. Post-tournament, feel free to reach out to me for sections of my dataset if that is of interest, but I will not have the time to do so during the tournament.
Give it a 63-bit string and it will output the bracket in plaintext.
Hash function: BLAKE3 (32-byte digest)
Leaf size: 8 MiB chunks (~1M brackets per leaf)
Record format: uint64 little-endian, 63 bits used per bracket
Tree construction: Binary Merkle tree; odd nodes paired with themselves: H(a || a)
Proof structure: Sibling hashes from leaf to root (~20 hashes for 1T brackets)
Full verification code and data format specification available in the GitHub repo.