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So, uh, did anyone but me notice that the last character of a twt hash is always either an
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a or a q? Which is the natural consequence of taking the last digit in the base32 representation of a 256-bit hash -- 256 is not evenly divisible by 5 ! That final character is made up of one bit of actual information and 4 bits of padding.
Oops, I’ve typed many words before thinking how to express the same thoughts more succintly. The TL;DR version is: attempting to detect edits from a client’s perspective leads to race conditions, and trying to increase your chance to “win the race” leads to wasteful behavior.