Quote from: bonker on June 13, 2013, 09:08:47 PM

I mean, given the insane resources and vital energy of the worlds cryptowonks, there has to be buckets of shortcut techniques that will cut the hash time vastly..... Must be more worth investigating that banging out more brute-force hardware.

Who's with me? I'm an epic maths genius, only suitable qualified persons need apply

Never say never, you can only accomplish the unthinkable if you consider it possible in the first place.
Among hundreds of scammers, there are some pretty clever people around here , and there are some pretty sophisticated ideas floating around, too.

However, people looking at speeding up btc-mining by discovering shortcuts (not necessarily in SHA256, but rather in the way it is used by bitcoin, and the way difficulty is modified in a p2p fashion), should have a pretty strong background in math, cryptology, computer science and engineering.

There are really only very few threads to be found here where you can find people discussing these things who obviously do have such a background, which is only really obvious to people with a similarly strong background. Some of the more interesting threads include:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55888.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120473.0

Bottom line being, you need to know how to translate crypto-maths into code and vice versa, not just at the HLL level (C/C++, OpenCL or VHDL), but also at the instruction level,i.e. assembly/RTL instructions and parallel hardware, i.e. GPUs, FPGA and structured/standard cell ASICs. All these skills are hard to find in a single person.

Again, I am not saying that SHA256 can be realistically broken by a single person, but rather that you can indeed make certain assumptions about the way SHA256 is used by bitcoin for mining purposes, and for controling difficulty through mining output, by just requiring more bits to be 0 - which conceptually /could/ translate into less potential work for the miners, like mentioned earlier.