Post by SeasonplanR12

You're absolutely right. Since the SHA256 is 64 characters, and each character is one of 16 possible values (see our Hex page for more about hexadecimal!), there is a total of 1.16x1077 hashes. That may seem like a lot, but that means that if you have 2x1077 messages to encode, some of them will have the same hash. That's called a "collision."