Orca Crypto
Foundations term

Hash

A fixed length fingerprint of any piece of data.

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Updated 2026-08-303 min readDefinition
Definition

A fixed length fingerprint of any piece of data.

A hash function takes any input and produces a fixed length output. Change one character of the input and the output changes completely and unpredictably. You cannot work backward from a hash to the original data.

Blockchains use hashes everywhere: to link blocks together, to identify transactions, to commit to data without revealing it, and in proof of work to make mining costly.

In practice

Bitcoin uses SHA-256. Mining is the search for an input whose hash starts with a certain number of zeros.

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