Bitcoin RIPEMD160 purpose Bitcoin uses RIPEMD160 on top of SHA256. Is its sole purpose to make public key address shorter or does it strengthen security in any way?
RIPEMD160 was designed in the open academic community and not like SHA2 by a NSA competition... one may see this as security advantage.

160bit hashes do also have less space requirements (then sha256) on the blockchain as well as in indexes, etc.