Re: Japanese researchers break 41 out of 64 steps of SHA256 with preimage attack.

Title: Japanese researchers break 41 out of 64 steps of SHA256 with preimage attack.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose preimage attacks [...]

sensationalist 6/10

Do you not understand all scientific papers use propose?

Propose as in "You can do it this way that we discovered"

Not propose as in "We think"

I think he means that you should evaluate the actual preimage attack that they propose before saying that they broke it.
I mean i can propose an attack: Search for all the possible keys one by one... This is a nice theoretical attack but has no value in the real world...

You could make a start on this attack by convincing people to pool their resources, perhaps by offering a financial incentive (maybe some bitcoins for contributing computing power)? People could even work on creating some sort of application specific hardware to efficiently search for SHA-256 hash values. You could structure it so that rewards are payed out proportionally to each persons contribution.

You make this stuff up as you type right?

Pretty much, yeah. In fact this last discussion has just given me an idea for a new type of P2P payment system - One which works without the need for a central authority to keep track of the ledger...

Are you sure its new? Lots of P2P payment systems have been proposed, and then promptly disappeared .................

My bad, turns out its been done already. Some guy called Satoshi already invented it back in 2008.