if anyone curious whats under the hood of SHA256 :

http://www-ma2.upc.es/~cripto/Q2-06-07/SHA256english.pdf

Jesus m8, you need to read previous comments, point that was previously discussed, if you have a counter argument even if I stated facts and not speculations please feel free to lay it down instead of repeating what you are told or heard without a minimum of thinking.

if the network hashrate is 30,000,000 Gh/S,
isn't that 30 million billion hashes per second?  would be the
same as enough computing power to try 30 million billion private
keys per second?

At that rate, it would only take the entire network 359,676 years,
not the billions of years said...

Good logic, but you have a math error I believe.  The network is 30 PH/s which is 30*10^15.  Simple trick is to just count the metric prefixes (each one is a factor of 1000).  So kilohash, megahash, gigahash, terrahash, petahash is 1,2,3,4,5 so 1000^5. The time required with the assumptions you have would be  359,676,102,360,200 years.  If we assume a network one trillion times more powerful it would still be 360 years.  

However even that is unlikely.  A couple points to consider:
1) The network can't do anything but compute hashes but if we assume it could be repurposed to brute force EDSA keys it would take more computing cycles to perform one ECC attempt than it does to perform one SHA-2 hash.  It would be something on the order of 80x as long (although that is some crude estimate on my hardware).  So 30 PH/s wouldn't be 30 PK/s but maybe 1 PK/s (peta keys attempted per second) but his is minor compared to #2 below.

2) The security of ECDSA is 128 bit if the PubKey is known.  If it the PubKey is unknown the only fastest attack is to attempt a preimage of the PubKeyHash.  That has a complexity of 2^160 which is 2^32 larger or ~ 4 billion.  Even if you could break a known PubKey in one year it would take 4 billion years to break the hash of an unknown pubkey.

Keys with 128 bit security are infeasible to break by brute force using classical computing.  However this doesn't mean that they can't be broken by cryptanalysis or quantum computing (which "go around" the problem rather than try to beat it by the pure expenditure of computing power).

  

oops, yeah i mistook a comma for a period on my calculator.

Yes, its 359,676,102,360,200 years with today's entire bitcoin network
trying to crack one private key, and that's assuming the network
could try a key at the same rate it can try a hash, and also assuming
the public key is known.

Brute force, definitely out even with all the fancy lasers and vapors
and hexagonal layer thingies.

What about breaking the encryption itself... this is a whole new
conversation ...how close do you think anyone is to cracking SHA-256 ?  

FYI, here's a javascript implementation of SHA-256.  its more clear
than the white paper version if you can read a bit of code.
Not suggesting read every line, but you see the overall complexity.

http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/sha256.html

well yeah the question in billions of dollars, although I have an idea, but the problem needs to be transformed into a matricial problem or at least Vectorial one, then you can relatively easly solve P = NP with Matrix triangulation or diagonalisation if that works but again meh lol

The easiest way would be to pretend to be Satoshis long lost brother and ask him for a couple quick millions. Should be as simple as that.

You. You bring your logic. And your facts. And your basic understanding of cryptography, computing, and the current state of quantum computing development. Did you stop to consider that you were derailing this community's gnashing of teeth over the suuper scaaarey magical quantum computer that's gunna steal all our coins? 

I'm pretty sure some folks were all ready to set their hair on fire and run around screaming.

*Shakes tiny fist*

To allay their dismay at the loss of a good panic,

Obligitory XKCD: