why did you complicate everything with hexadecimal representation. SHA256, as the name suggests, produces a 256-bit result. each bit can have 2 values (0 or 1) so the total number of combinations are 2256 which is equal to 1.15e+77
No no. I get the point that its about 0 or 1 value. But since our hash is made up of 0-9 and A-F human understandable language we will have to consider the same when we will have to reverse the whole stuff.
I mean, A is 01000001, B is 01000010 and so on. Ok thats fine. That is about computer reading it that way.
But for me its gonna be 0-9 and A-F with the combinations generating a seed for me. And the number of them are as stated earlier.
You see where I am going with this?
i am not familiar with how QC works but SHA is working with integers (unsigned int to be exact) and there is lots and lots of operations in one round of SHA, i don't think you can use the number of OPs you reported here as a calculating point for computing SHA
Now what I said here was to give input to QC where it understand how SHA is giving out / more or less behaving with the input data based on the algorithm. It's always evolving with each input and it's just assumption that it will successful know all the input that was there in the past for a specific seed.
you still have to store those hashes and the data that created that hash somewhere. 1.15e+77 byte memory does not exist and that doesn't even consider the size of the data.
Its possible. Since you talking about memory and I am talking about the combination.
Simply this
"559aead08264d5795d3909718cdd05abd49572e84fe55590eef31a88a08fdffd" means letter "A".
What we need is above combination. Not the one what you saying.
Or may be I need to read more before I can know I am predicting it right.
it is not "breaking the code" your explanation sounds like collision to me. and if we get closer to the day where it may become a possibility we switch to stronger hash algorithms just like we have before.
Surely we will have far more secure algorithm if that happens.
But, it will reveal identity of every transaction that happened in the past. Lets say
BTC transaction may be.