Comment by EGreg

The key to why this even works (and didn’t work before) is here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/paper-shows-relying-on-has...

Simply put, a reliable random oracle in an adversarial environment should be based on sources of randomness from multiple sources and participants, usually the sources are the participants’ meaningful actions to prevent collusion.

It has been known for quite a while that if the space of inputs being hashed is small, the hashing is relatively useless for most benefits of a true one-way function (eg hashing a phone number in USA).