Re:Multihash – self-describing hashes
by cmrx64 on Sunday February 26, 2017 @04:05PM
(#13739858)
Some hashing algorithms have a configurable output length. You need to encode the length, or have it as part of the type, and it's more uniform to just have it separate from the type.
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I guess it depends on how precious space is. A naked hash is very information-dense. In certain applications, inserting a prefix of several bytes to each hash makes a difference. OTOH, if the hashes end up being inserted into a table in MySQL, then space is probably not that precious.