Claim: SHA-256 output can be predicted

[easyasot3]

A company has claimed to have developed a method that "is able to predict the likelihood of an input to SHA-256 (the core algorithm to mine Bitcoins) to produce a winning Hash". The claim was made in this RNS on the London Stock Exchange.

The Company announced on 13 March 2024 the development of a proprietary AI Oracle, broadly defined by the R&D team as Method C. While the Machine Learning model has previously been defined as Method C, the result of its `training' with relevant data is known in the industry as an AI Oracle. This Oracle is being used by QBT to implement its prediction engine.

Method C's AI Oracle is able to predict the likelihood of an input to SHA-256 (the core algorithm to mine Bitcoins) to produce a winning Hash. Should the AI Oracle calculate that the current SHA-256 will not be successful in finding the winning Hash, it skips that calculation and moves on to the next input. In the March 2024 announcement, the Company reported that irrelevant SHA-256 computations were being avoided almost 30% of the time.

My understanding is that the output of SHA-256 is essentially random and unpredictable, and that if the company's claim is true then this would have a devastating impact on both the bitcoin mining industry, and also all internet security in general.

The company acknowledge in the RNS how extraordinary their claim is: "The Company believes this is a major innovation, which undermines a key Bitcoin Mining industry assumption that the SHA-256 algorithm output cannot be predicted"

The company's share price rose significantly after this announcement. If the claims are mathematically impossible, then they might be fraudulent and might be misleading investors.

According to the company website, their CEO graduated in Theoretical Physics at Padova University and became a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Milan University. In this RNS they report engaging the services of Lov Grover (of Grover's algorithm fame), so they seem to have some credibility.

Does anyone have good evidence debunking this claim? Or is the claim possible?

 

[Mick West]

My understanding is that the output of SHA-256 is essentially random and unpredictable, and that if the company's claim is true then this would have a devastating impact on both the bitcoin mining industry, and also all internet security in general.

Their claim just makes mining bitcoin 30% more efficient, if true. We don't know if it is true. It does not allow for any decryption or invalidation of digital signatures.

It takes a while to mine one bitcoin. So I wonder if it's just an optimistic interpretation of a small sample.

 

[Mendel]

The claim was made in this RNS on the London Stock Exchange.

While the Company is now finally able to demonstrate the above achievements in real time simulated mining, using QBT's AI Oracle hardware implementation (see below) and a simulation of the blockchain using historic data, it has to be noted that recent lab tests have also clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of the AI Oracle, as a result of the training of the Method C model, running at the current level of mining difficulty.

So essentially they seem to have trained a LLM to identify duds in historic data, which is entirely useless for actual work.

Also, I can easily predict whether a given input is going to win simply by running SHA256 on it, which is very cheap. Any prediction method must be more efficient than that to be economically viable. That's a hurdle no AI can meet.

Note that theoriginal claim dates back to 2024, and the impact was negligible. This year's improvement raises the efficiency from 30% to 50%, which is still pretty useless.