Thank you all for your help. I am the OP. I haven't looked at the link that talks about the probability of collision. Intuitively, I still wonder how the chances of collision can be so low. We are reducing a 4K block to just 256 bits. If the chances of collision are so low, *theoretically* it is possible to reconstruct the original block from the 256-bit signature by using a simple lookup. Essentially, we would now have world's best compression algorithm irrespective of whether the data is text or binary. This is hard to digest.
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