Merkle trees

I was thinking about a similar problem recently. Why not use a Merkle tree store for disk images? Kind of like what dm-verity does, except use the Merkle tree for deduplication instead of integrity. After all, files (which may be present in many images within the store) within a filesystem tend to be aligned on block boundaries, and the leaves of the tree would successfully deduplicate no matter what order the files' underlying storage blocks are allocated in. The leaves within the store would also be aligned on disk block boundaries themselves, allowing for efficient read-only mounting of a virtual block device view in real time.

Was going to implement a prototype but I'm too busy these days.