4 ms·
> in general sha-256 is already really fast. Why bother with something faster? Have you never sat there waiting for a hash to finish computing? I regularly do
by chrisseaton 5y ago
> in general sha-256 is already really fast. Why bother with something faster?
Have you never sat there waiting for a hash to finish computing? I regularly do and I'm not even dealing with large data. It's very slow, and worse than that it's both very slow and also entirely sequential! (So is BLAKE2 - BLAKE3 is parallel.)
Worse than that - it's an astronomical waste of energy if we could be doing the same thing in less time. I wonder how many hashes humanity runs a day?
- _zllx 5y agoI heard the problem is so prevalent that they started making custom ASIC boards for calculating SHA-256 and building big farms full of them. At least we know that each and every one of the hashes calculated were useful and necessary, right?
- chrisseaton 5y agoI don't know why you're being snarky at me? We need cryptographic hashes for many legitimate applications completely outside crypto-currencies, many of which protect critical things like national security and personal privacy.
- _zllx 5y agoSnarky is directed at the people who do proof-of-work cryptocurrency, not snarky directed at you. My bad for not putting a winky face or something.
- oconnor663 5y agoTo be fair, running the AVX-512 implementation of BLAKE3 on all cores is a pretty intense power draw :)
- chrisseaton 5y agoSHA-256 is also normally implemented using AVX-512. And BLAKE is faster even on a single core, so it's strictly less compute time using the same instruction set.
- bawolff 5y agoI'm curious as to what sort of files you are hashing where ~0.5 gb/s is so slow as to cause a noticeable delay but yet the file is not "large". For that matter, if your file is on disk, i would expect that sha-256 already works faster than reading from disk, so its not like blake3 is going to improve on that.