Merkle DAGs inherit the distributability of CIDs. Using content-addressing for DAGs has several interesting consequences for their distribution. The first, of course, is that anybody who has a DAG is capable of acting as a provider for that DAG. The second is that when we’re retrieving data encoded as DAG, like a directory of files, we can leverage this fact to retrieve all of a node’s children in parallel, potentially from a number of different providers! The third is that file servers are not limited to centralized data centers, giving our data greater reach. Finally, because each node in a DAG has its own CID, the DAG it represents can be shared and retrieved independently of any DAG it is itself embedded in.
As an example, consider the distribution of a large, popular, scientific dataset. Today, on the location-addressed web:
Merkle DAGs help us alleviate all of these problems. By distributing the dataset as a content-addressed DAG:
All of this works to promote scalable and redundant access to this important data.