Differences between hashed text and encrypted text I was wondering if it's possible to tell if the text is hashed or encrypted. For example, if someone has given you a a chain of random characters. Would you be able to tell if it's encrypted? Which you could be able to retrieve the original text by having the private key. Or it's hashed which there is no way to reverse it.
Hash is very short, e.g. 8 bytes, 32 bytes, 64 bytes, no matter how long the original text is. Where as encrypted text is actually unlimited.

If the encrypted text is relatively long, you can calculate some statistical values. Where as hash is short and is no sufficient for any statistics. E.g. how will you speak about some frequency if you only have 32 bytes?

Hash is a one way transformation. In a normal case there is no way to restore the original text. If you had a text of 1000000 bytes and hash of 64 bytes, it is clear that  there is no way to obtain 1000000 bytes from 64 bytes.

To randomness: It is one of the goals of good encryption to make the encrypted message indistinguishable from a random sequence of bytes.