Content Addressing for Document Identity: Why “What a File Is” Beats “Where It Lives”

Every document — every file, every web page, every email body — has at least two identities. One is where it lives: a URL, a path, a row in a database. The other is what it actually is: the bytes themselves, independent of location. The second one is far more interesting, and far more fragile than most people realize. Content addressing is the practice of naming a document by its content rather than its address. It’s the idea behind Git’s commit hashes, IPFS’s CIDs, and the de-duplication layer in every backup system. But “content” is a slippery word — and depending on how you hash it, you get wildly different answers to the question “is this the same document?” Location addressing vs. content addressing Most of the web runs on location addressing. You ask for https://example.com/report.pdf, and the server hands you whatever happens to be at that address today. Nothing stops it from being a different report.pdf tomorrow. The name and the content have no binding relationship. Content…

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