I cannot physically measure the benefits of this collaborative puzzle-solving. Who cares if it's 100, 500, or 1500 Mk/s? It's the same slow hashing shit, even with all possible fixes. Without something groundbreaking, it's a dead end.
They will work on it for at least two years, and eventually, someone will collect all the prizes using a bot script. It is likely that only resellers of cloud and GPU hosting will benefit.
And if some genius discovers something groundbreaking, do you think they will publicly open-source it? I'm not sure about their safety after that..Which comes to the next point... being slow is what makes them (agencies with three letters) secure. They don't want it to be fast.
There's no hashing for kangaroo, just plain point addition as fast as possible. Which translates to 256-bit arithmetic mambo-jambo.
I used believe it or not Pollard Rho to crack a Windows XP CD for the first time.
It took about 19 hours.
It used completely different parameters, but the principle is the same.