But in the end, they are the same. The major difference between a merkle tree (or patricia trie or whatever is implemented in x or y) and "blockchain technology" is the distributed consensus algorithm. Blockchain - by your own definition, is "blockchain", because its a hashed data structure with a distributed consensus algorithm. Now, of course I'm splitting hairs; and the reason for it is that merkle trees (or hashed variants) aren't groundbreaking or new - they've been around for decades. What is somewhat interesting is the proposition of a distributed structure with the same properties. The groundbreaking innovation from "blockchain technology" stops there.