[SwellJoe]

I believe this question exhibits a lack of understanding of what "mining" Bitcoins means. Or possibly how Bitcoin works. Or both.

Mining Bitcoins is simply a search for an SHA256 hash matching a certain set of criteria. The mining hardware could theoretically be used to search for hash collisions faster than previously existing hardware, but that is of limited utility in the scenario of trying to find a specific hash collision (i.e. one that allows you to decrypt a file or login to a system) rather than one that meets certain qualifications (but doesn't have to be an exact match for one unique hash).

The set of possible values is so large that even the next generation of ASIC mining hardware (which will continue the exponential growth of worldwide hashing power) would require hundred or thousands of years (I don't know the specifics and can't be bothered to find the numbers with specificity), on average, to find a specific hash. SHA256 is still strong, even assuming a vastly larger pool of searching machines.

In short: Bitcoin mining is not "cracking" SHA256. It's gambling on finding a hash that has one specific (rare, but not even close to unique) characteristic. Finding one, just like winning at poker or at the roulette wheel, does not make the next round easier.

[gibybo]

>even the next generation of ASIC mining hardware (which will continue the exponential growth of worldwide hashing power) would require hundred or thousands of years (I don't know the specifics and can't be bothered to find the numbers with specificity), on average, to find a specific hash.

It would take much longer than that.

The current hashing power of the entire Bitcoin network is ~5 PH/s. If we assume it will increase 200x over the next generation of ASICs (this is unlikely), it will still only be ~1 EH/s. That's 1e18 hashes per second, or 3e25 hashes per year. Finding an input that hashes to a specific 2^256 bit hash would take, on average, 2e51 years. The universe is only 14e9 years old.

[dnautics]

What if someone is collecting everything, including the misses, from bitcoin mining and running some sort of statistical analysis on it to determine if there are patterns in the noise.

[gibybo]

Bitcoin mining generates 160 quadrillion bytes (160 Petabytes) of misses per second. The limit would be the amount of data that you could reasonably store and analyze, and we were at that limit long before Bitcoin came around.

(Although you can't actually collect the misses from other miners, because they never publish them).

[dnautics]

true. It is however, possible that some statistical analysis can be run on the hits, although interpretation would be convoluted since the initial value is SHA'd twice.