What Is a ‘Collision Resistance’ Property in Hashing and Why Is It Vital for Bitcoin?

Collision resistance means it is computationally infeasible to find two different inputs that produce the exact same hash output. This property is vital for Bitcoin because if a collision could be easily found, a malicious actor could create a fraudulent transaction (Input A) that produces the same hash as a legitimate transaction (Input B).

They could then replace the legitimate transaction with the fraudulent one without invalidating the block structure, undermining the entire network's integrity.