[p2p-hackers] References for using hashes as unique identifiers?

[Gordon Mohr]

Search for "content-derived names" and you'll find a couple of papers in 97 and
98 which sing the praises of hash-based file-naming.

MD5 is also listed as one of the possibilities for assigning URN names,
an URN being "a name with global scope which does not imply a location,"
in 1994's RFC 1737, "Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names."
Larry Masinter, one of the RFC 1737 coauthors, also casually refers to
the technique in his 1995 article, "Document Management, Digital Libraries
and the Web", and mentions a contemporaneous system ("LIFN") using hashes
to create resource names.

I've also heard anecdotally of use in configuration management, caching, or
information-product distribution in the early 1990s or late 1980s.

- Gordon