It is only small in older hashes. Modern hashes tend to have a state larger than both the seed and the input block. See: https://github.com/demerphq/smhasher/

It is only small in older hashes. Modern hashes tend to have a state larger than both the seed and the input block. See: https://github.com/demerphq/smhasher/blob/master/HashAnatomy.md https://github.com/demerphq/smhasher/blob/master/HashAnatomy... It actually turns out there are performance benefit by having a larger seed, but not too large. (If you think about it this makes sense consider how many bits you can change with an average combining operation, and with a worse case combining operation.)