What is Crypto Hashing?

The beauty of blockchain lies in transparency and, paradoxically, privacy.

Right off the bat, a user wouldn't know the source of transactions or identities of transactors without using special tools.

Making this possible is a public ledger's integration of cryptography and a 'hashing' algorithm.

To 'hash' a transaction in crypto circles is to take the input string of any length and turn it into a cryptographic fixed output. 

Hashes come in handy in Proof-of-work systems where miners must find the hash of a block matching the set difficulty.

It is one-way traffic. 

However, this doesn't mean the transaction cannot be decrypted. The original transaction can be extracted by decrypting the 'hash.'

Hashing is only possible because of a hashing algorithm. 

In Ethereum, the hashing algorithm deployed is Ethash, while Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm.

Hashing in blockchain is critical since it guarantees transactions' credibility and makes it hard to unroll transactions, preserving the immutability property that defines blockchains.

Hashing is set in a way that every block has the 'hash' of the previous block.