I wonder how much money in Bitcoin they would have made if they had used those hashes to mine instead.

Speaking of which, it would be funny if they were pretending to do security research but added a secret backdoor to mine bitcoin instead, somehow exporting those hashes or using the partial results of SHA-1 calculations (BTC isn't SHA-1).

I'm just joking, but I wonder if that's possible. If anyone is Machiavellian enough for that, it's security researchers.