[ComputerGuru]

Exactly and good examples. I believe the general concept is just sharding, for anyone that wants to google it further. Typically naive sharding on the first few bytes is useless because it results in uneven distributions but (and this is what I mean when I said SHA was designed for this) a cryptographic hash should result in a uniform random-appearing distribution across all its bits, meaning the resulting hash is uniquely suitable for basic sharding by prefix.

But then they wouldn’t have been able to give it a fancy name if they called it what it is.