Purpose of expanding then shrinking in SHA-1 What is the purpose of expanding then shrinking in SHA-1? Does it serves any security purposes?
Expanding then shrinking in SHA-1 refers to the process, performed for each round (each 512-bit block of padded message), of


message expansion from 512 bits to 2560 bits;
keeping only 160 bits of state for the next round.


The later directly follows from the construction of SHA-1 as a Merkle-Damgård hash of 160 bit. The former occurs because SHA-1's compression function is built from a block cipher using the Davies-Meyer construction, that is with the message entering the block cipher's (512-bit) key input; and, as most block ciphers do, the particular block cipher used in SHA-1 uses a key schedule, expanding the key to 80 subkeys (each 32-bit), one per round.

The expanding in SHA-1 is thus the key schedule of its block cipher, and is there to make SHA-1's internal block cipher secure, making SHA-1's compression function collision-resistant, making SHA-1 collision-resistant.

As an illustration that the key schedule/expansion plays a security role, the short-lived SHA (now known by the retronym SHA-0) differs from SHA-1 by a weaker key schedule (with one less word rotation), and is more badly broken than SHA-1 is (in particular, by  Yusuke Naito, Yu Sasaki, Takeshi Shimoyama, Jun Yajima, Noboru Kunihiro, Kazuo Ohta: Improved Collision Search for SHA-0, in proceedings of ASIACRYPT 2006).