[andrewcooke]

can you expand on why hash isn't sufficient for consensus? (i am just curious - i know nothing about this, but it seems like as long as the hash space is large enough that there are no collisions in the age of the universe etc etc..)

[lonestar]

The hash could be used as the response in a consensus protocol, but it looks like Enchilada leaves building that protocol up to the developer.

So like I said, it's nice to have that hash for every reference, but I wonder if it's worth the storage overhead, and if a developer will use it when he's building his own distributed system anyway.

[andrewcooke]

ah, ok, thanks. for "simple" values they wouldn't need to actually store the hash. instead they could use, for example, the actual value of an int, byte, float etc, xored with a type-specific base (but it wouldn't be that great as a hash in, say, a hash table - better to use some function that preserves uniqueness but disperses related values). that would mean they only need to store large hashes for composite structures.

edit: i am making life too complicated. in short, if it can be calculated quickly, it doesn't have to be stored.