This market resolves YES if a quantum computer successfully breaks SHA-256 encryption before January 1, 2030. Resolution will be based on peer-reviewed research papers or official announcements from major quantum computing companies/research institutions confirming a successful break of SHA-256.
Resolution criteria:
Must be a verified, reproducible break of the full SHA-256 algorithm
Must be practically demonstrated, not just theoretical
Must be confirmed by multiple independent sources in the cryptography community
No power restriction, but it must take less than 1 month to decode a single encrypted file.
1,000There is no such thing as SHA-256 encryption. It is not an encryption algorithm, it is a cryptographic hash function. You cannot encrypt files with it.
There are certain properties a cryptographic hash function must satisfy. I'm going to assume this question is about violating those properties (which would lead cryptographers to consider the hash function "broken"), rather than anything to do with encrypting files.
To the best of our current knowledge, a quantum computer could provide only a quadratic speedup compared to a brute-force attack (using Grover's algorithm). That would take the attack from a 2^256 to 2^128, but even assuming an extremely powerful quantum computer this is still completely infeasible to compute.