I participated in some Freenet architecture discussions when they were still trying to take the prototype to a practical implementation. There was some talk even back then about how opaque hashes are to the human mind and that we might be better off using phrase mnemonics instead. Particularly useful I would think for transcription errors like this, malicious or accidental.

The problem is that the information density of replacing hex with words is quite low, on the order of 14 bits per word, but much longer than the four letters needed to represent 16 bits in hex, which is itself a lot less dense than base64. You’d need 12 words to uniquely identify a sha-1 hash and most modern algorithms are less dense than that. But it would be harder to trick someone.

Maybe there’s some sort of 5:4 coding system that’s easier for humans to scan, still to be discovered out there?