From Name to Fingerprint

After we tidy your name into one recipe, we don’t feed that recipe directly into the number line. We turn it into a fingerprint first. In computer science we call that a hash.

What’s a hash?

Think of it like a seal or a stamp. You put something in (your name), and you get one fixed pattern out. The same input always gives the same output. “Alice” will always produce the same hash; “Bob” will always produce a different one. Change one letter and the whole fingerprint changes.

The magic — and the security — is that the process is one-way. From the fingerprint, nobody can figure out your name. It’s not encryption (which can be undone with a key). It’s a one-way recipe: name → fingerprint, and that’s it.

What we use

We use an algorithm called SHA-256. It’s the same kind of hashing used to keep the web and your passwords safe. It takes your normalized name (the “recipe” from the previous step) and produces a fixed block of 32 bytes. From that we take the first 16 bytes to build your starting number on the number line.

So: your name becomes one recipe, the recipe becomes one fingerprint, and that fingerprint becomes one starting point. Same name → same fingerprint → same prime. Different name → different fingerprint → different prime. And nobody can go backward from the fingerprint to your name.