I don't think you are, and the IPFS ecosystem has already run into this problem. In IPFS, content is addressed by its hash, but different protocols are better s

I don't think you are, and the IPFS ecosystem has already run into this problem. In IPFS, content is addressed by its hash, but different protocols are better suited to different encodings - browsers speak http, which is case insensitive. And so they've worked out self-describing hashes! https://multiformats.io/multihash/ https://multiformats.io/multihash/ The basic idea is that you include the name of the algorithm as part of the hash. This allows changing the hash algorithm without breaking backwards compatibility. It's a cool standard with implementations[0] for many languages. I don't know if it was considered for git, but it does seem likely that this issue will come up again before the end of time :) [0]https://github.com/multiformats/multihash https://github.com/multiformats/multihash