This isn’t true at all. Mining involves guessing a salt which, when added to data for a single block’s with of transactions, makes the hash have a certain sum

This isn’t true at all. Mining involves guessing a salt which, when added to data for a single block’s with of transactions, makes the hash have a certain sum of zeros. They are only the same in that they are using randomness to search for some number satisfying a given criteria. But, for example, you couldn’t use mining hardware to search for wallets with open balances. The mining hardware is specially optimized for one thing only.