> but implementations are slow Well, think about this: One major reason hash functions like sha1 aren't recommended (as opposed to, say, bcrypt) for encryptio

> but implementations are slow Well, think about this: One major reason hash functions like sha1 aren't recommended (as opposed to, say, bcrypt) for encryption is because they are optimized for speed and so it's faster to generate lookup tables or to iteratively search for the password. So unless it's slow because the implementation itself is crappy, this might actually be a good thing after all.