BLAKE3-specs VS multihash

We put a lot of effort into section 5.1.2 of https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3-specs/blob/master/blak..., and the relatively more complicated part of BLAKE3 (incrementally building the Merkle tree) ends up being ~4 lines of code. Let me know what you think.

BLAKE3 is a new function which includes a KDF mode, and is significantly faster than HKDF-SHA256. However, it hasn't seen as much cryptanalysis as more established functions, so I'm still somewhat wary of it (admittedly it's a reduced-round variant of BLAKE2s, with extra modes, so I'm not that wary, but it's still worth a warning).

The BLAKE3 spec is also pretty readable (though I think the graphics in the BLAKE2b paper make it a bit easier to understand).

> That's for 16KiB inputs.

BLAKE3 needs 16 KiB of input to hit the numbers in that bar chart, but BLAKE2s doesn't. It'll maintain its advantage over SHA-256 all the way down to the empty string. You can see this in Figure 3 of https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3-specs/blob/master/blak.... (BLAKE3 is also faster than SHA-256 all the way down to the empty string, but not by as large a margin as the 16 KiB figures suggest.)

On the other hand, these measurements were done on machines without SHA-256 hardware acceleration. If you have that (and Intel chips from the past year do), then SHA-256 does a lot better of course.

Its section 2.1 of the paper: https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3-specs/blob/master/blak...

Though, note, blake3 still provides enhanced resistance against the attacks against blake2 even in the case where you only have one block, due to the change in how the fundamental hashing primitive is used.

Consensus is done with Blockmania, a PBFT consensus protocol. Link P2P networking stack (in progress) = libp2p. Link (currently we're using Serf for cluster membership, but this will be replaced by libp2p) We use Blake 3 for merkle tree and hashing algorithm. Link (amongst others that are standard, e.g. multisig) Lthash is used for block propagation and homomorphic hashing, and to extend for bootstrapping. Link For transaction and balance privacy we use:

Since you seem to have done a fair bit of research in this area, do you have any opinions or thoughts about the Multihash format?

https://multiformats.io/multihash/

It fills in some of the blanks in your "prefixing the hash with the value of the enum for the hash" step.

This library supports latest Accumulate API v3 features with multibase and multihash addresses, and adds many corrections to the usability and structure of the library. Overall it's different from other clients that are generated from the Go codebase, and developed for developers with canonical Dart approaches.

> IPFS now uses base58btc exclusively

That's blatantly wrong. IPFS supports 25 different base representations (https://github.com/multiformats/multibase/blob/master/multib...).

In fact, recently, two community members decided to implement a new base encoding with emojis for fun:

https://cid.ipfs.tech/#%F0%9F%9A%80%F0%9F%AA%90%E2%AD%90%F0%...

https://github.com/multiformats/multihash supports at the very least SHA1 SHA2-256 SHA2-512 SHA3/Keccak Blake2b-256/Blake2b-512/Blake2s-128/Blake2s-256 Blake3 and Strobe. Hashes in IPFS are being standardised through the IETF and W3C https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-multiformats-multihash-05.html.

If you need rhash, you are welcome to submit a PR! We also have a grants program you can use to be rewarded for this.

Also check out multihash from the IPFS folks: https://github.com/multiformats/multihash

It's a more robust, well-specified, interoperable version of this concept.

Though it's probably overkill if you control both the consumer and producer side (i.e. don't need the interoperability) and are just looking to make hash upgrades smoother, in that case a simple version prefix like Go's approach described above has lower overhead.

Previously, a PeerId was internally represented as a multihash, a scheme to specify different hashes with their respective hashing methods. These hashes were then encoded in base58btc.