OK, but bcrypt works! As far as anyone knows, the best you can do is just brute-force it, which is the same situation we're in with public key cryptography. T

OK, but bcrypt works! As far as anyone knows, the best you can do is just brute-force it, which is the same situation we're in with public key cryptography. The only substantiative difference is that passwords are often of a length and complexity that actually permits brute force or a dictionary attack -- meaning we're back to, is it small and memorizable, or a big binary blob, as being the distinguishing property.