Conjecture: not sure if this is the reason why SHA is used, but a useful side effect is that it may make users of Riak less vulnerable to certain types of denia

Conjecture: not sure if this is the reason why SHA is used, but a useful side effect is that it may make users of Riak less vulnerable to certain types of denial of service attacks. Not 100% sure since I know little about how Riak works, but a more predictable hashing algorithm could make it easy for attackers to overload a given bucket with data, and slow down the db to a crawl.