When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.
- Hunter S Thompson
There is no cracking going on and you would know this if you just traced the protocol process.
All you are doing is finding rare outcomes. Hashes that look like 00000000BLAH. The number of zeroes is related to your difficulty.
That is all it is.
you dont understand what hacking is. What you're talking about is what mathematicians do. Hacking is finding the weakest link in a system, and exploiting it.
It's your kind of thinking that leads to complacenncy which is what hackers love.
A hacker would much rather hack an easy stash of 400k bitcoins than reverse an algorithm that might get them 500 bitcoins an hour, before the algo was re-tweaked to something else, once it became obvious. Most hackers couldnt come close to doing what mathematicians do, they rely on mostly on easy scripts and human error and social engineering.
A hacker wouldnt even try to reverse the algo, they'd rewrite a crypto.dll call to make the algorithm meaningless, then put it on 2-3 major mining pools.. or they'd corrupt the portal used to distribute bitcoin.exe, or write a worm that did it, or DDOS major pools, or hell just bribe an IT guy working at tradehill.