Hashing

Hashing is one of the fundamental reasons that make blockchain technology as secure and great as it is now.

In short, Hashing is the process of taking a key and through a mathematical algorithm, making it into a different value. The “different value” is the hash (also known as hash value). A good hash is one that could not be converted to the original key.

What Makes Hashing So Great?

A hash is the unique product of a key. What does it mean? Let me show you an example: In this example, we are going to use SHA-256 to hash a key.

What Is SHA-256?

It’s short for Secure Hashing Algorithm and is the hash function and mining algorithm of Bitcoin protocol. But enough about that, let’s dive in. For this example, I’m using an SHA-256 hash calculator to calculate the hash value of a key. The key is “john”. It’s all in non-capital characters.

The hash value of “john” is:

60976712c7f60fa538bcacf402529b41589f589de3058713b4759062cc0110ea

Now, let’s do it again, with a little change in the key. We’ll write john with a capital O.