Photo by Guillaume Jaillet on Unsplash

Which is the fastest hashing method … and has O(1) complexity?

Well, the fastest hash might be just taking the first eight bytes of our data to produce a hash. But that is likely to create lots of collisions where the first eight bytes are the same, such as “Edinburgh123” and “Edinburgh99”. A stronger method is to sample bytes, and merge these into a 64-byte hash. The complexity is then O(1), as it doesn’t matter how much data we have, as we…