The obvious improvements have been done a long time ago (there are tens of millions of dollars to be gained here), and the current state of the art continues to spend tremendous effort pushing out every incremental gain they can. Most of the innovation is done in hardware implementations at the moment, because if you're running a software algorithm to find the hash you've already lost.
Solving a SHA256 hash for a particular value would require breaking the hash in some currently unknown way. However, looking at how past hash algorithms have fared, it seems likely this will eventually happen.
Comments
The obvious improvements have been done a long time ago (there are tens of millions of dollars to be gained here), and the current state of the art continues to spend tremendous effort pushing out every incremental gain they can. Most of the innovation is done in hardware implementations at the moment, because if you're running a software algorithm to find the hash you've already lost.
Solving a SHA256 hash for a particular value would require breaking the hash in some currently unknown way. However, looking at how past hash algorithms have fared, it seems likely this will eventually happen.