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