I'm currently reading the Princeton Blockchain Book, and came across this concept:
Proof of membership. Another nice feature of Merkle trees is that, unlike the block chain that we built before, it allows a concise proof of membership.
The idea(from what I understood) is that, in the Merkle Tree, when we have a data block we can simply traverse the path towards the root, and then confirm that the root is indeed the correct one, hence confirming membership of said block. Why would one not be able to do that in a Blockchain, since it's an acyclic data structure and any valid block would allow us to reach the root?