I started reading about how bitcoin transactions are processed and I came across the Merkle Tree. I learned that one of its purposes is to prevent nodes from storing the entire bitcoin transaction history. The bitcoin paper also mentions that after a block is buried under enough blocks, the whole merkle tree can be deleted and the merkle root can be kept in that block. However, none of this whole process mentions nodes keeping track of transactions. So how would a node be able to access previous transactions like the initial bitcoin transaction?
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