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>and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.

So why'd you bring it up?

User bitcoinistrash is the one that brought it up, and they're spreading incorrect information about how it works.

Cracking sha256 hashes implies trying to reverse a specific hash. There are literally thousands (millions?) of potential inputs that hash to a valid bitcoin mining block output. It's basically a race to find the first one matching the rules of the current block difficulty. The goal isn't to produce any one specific input/hash pair.

In which context would somebody try to reverse a hash? That would be like arbitrarily enhancing a bad-resolution image to see something that cannot be seen.

Hash collision should always be about finding matching content for a hash.

And if you cracked the math of sha256 you wouldnt need to search you would just calculate one of the inputs to produce whatever you want. All zeros would be as easy as one.

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