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Question: is the in-URL hash some form of Merkle tree root hash? Or is another method used to avoid having to download all the data before the hash can be verified?

Searching for “Merkle” on https://ipld.io/specs/transport/car/carv2/ gives no results.

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Similar. It’s a Merkle DAG.

There’s an intro to IPFS content identifiers here: https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/content-addressing/.

Thanks!

Why a DAG rather than a tree, though? I can't seem to find an explanation for why a DAG is needed — I would think a tree should suffice.

It's content addressable: the same file can be linked to, from many places. So then it can't be a tree

(But I'm new to IPFS)

From https://ipfs.tech:

> the innovation of content addressing: store, retrieve, and locate data based on the fingerprint of its actual content

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