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Chances of a sha1 collision (Score:1)
SHA1 is 160-bit checksum. 2**160 is around 10**48. Then I plugged that into the formula I found on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] to see how many checksums you'd have to generate to have a 50% chance of a collision. The answer is around 10**24.
To give you an idea of how big that number is, if you generated one git commit a second, it would take 4.5 quadrillion years before you'd have a 50% chance of a collision. That's plenty big enough for me.
Of course this is assuming that the checksums are evenly distributed over the entire 160-bit range. But that's why crypto people make the big bucks.
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