[pornel]

> exceedingly rare

To have a mere one in a billion chance of getting a SHA-256 collision, you'd need to spend 160 million times more energy than the total annual energy production on our planet (and that's assuming our best bitcoin mining efficiency, actual file hashing needs way more energy).

The probability of a collision is so astronomically small, that if your computer ever observed a SHA-256 collision, it would certainly be due to a CPU or RAM failure (bit flips are within range of probabilities that actually happen).

[unclebucknasty]

You know, I've been hearing people warn of handling potential collisions for years and knew the odds were negligible, but never really delved into it in any practical sense.

Context is everything.