Finding a collision isn't breaking SHA256. Breaking SHA256 (or at least, any manner of breaking that would matter to us) is finding a FAST and EFFICIENT way to find a collision, other than brute forcing. There is no way to do this that is currently known, and it's stood up to many many cryptographic tests and analysis, people trying to hack it for years.
well its different when you just work for your guaranteed wages and when there is a instant free big money floating, people could improve in their skills considerably with the right motivation.
However this is most probably a supercomputer working for a short time. Or more probably a good luck.
Yes, the promise of bitcoins, which in TOTAL, at their PEAK was worth less than 40 million dollars (Current Block # * Peak Price) is far more alluring than all of the bank systems relying on SHA256 encryption, all the SSH tunnels to be sniffed, government secrets, crime syndication, encrypted emails, and all the fame of being the one who broke it.
Also, nothing says this is the same person. If it went to multiple addresses, it could very well be multiple people. If it went to the same address, that could be one of the larger pools' addresses. The conspiracy theorists in this forum are growing thick as mud.
ok since clearly you like conspiracy theories so much i will give you another one, my today's special! i invented this one just now while walking to work.
imagine how much people want to crack sha256.
before bitcoin: a bunch of professional security specialists. also criminals but they lack the skillz anyway.
after bitcoin: basically every single geek on this planet who is capable of reading a C source code of SHA256 implementation. they are not criminals mostly, or if some of them potentially are, they have other means to live and criminal activities are not their strongest suit anyway.
which is orders of magnitude more.
so here is the conspiracy theory: satoshi is basically a security expert of sorts who is testing his new method of brute forcing the security algorithms. basically all the geeks on this planet are raw computational power that tries to solve the SHA256 hash with their feeble minds. just like with mining, one by one they have very little chances to solve it, but working at once on the same task they might solve the block much faster!
we'll see how it goes