Message Digest
a.k.a. Hash, Digest
The short, fixed-length fingerprint a hash function produces from any piece of data.
A message digest is what comes out the other end of a hash function. Feed in a word, a novel or a whole block of transactions, and you get back a fixed-length string of characters, like a fingerprint. Change a single comma in the input and the fingerprint changes completely.
Blockchains lean on this constantly: each block carries the digest of the one before it, so tampering with old data would break every link after it. MD5 and the SHA family are well-known digest algorithms (MD5 is now considered broken for security work).
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