Content-addressed Merkle DAGs for immutable resources and snapshots

Document status: reviewed. Canonical source.

Summary

Merkle DAGs assign immutable nodes identifiers derived from their contents and referenced children. This provides verifiable immutable snapshots and deduplication but changes identity whenever content changes.

NUIF relevance

Use content hashes for immutable assets, packages and canonical snapshots, but not for editable semantic entity identity. Stable entity IDs and content-addressed snapshot/resource IDs solve different problems and must remain separate.