I thought SHA256 was only faster than MD5 with the right hardware acceleration features present, which are common, but not ubiquitous? I agree on the BLAKE fro

I thought SHA256 was only faster than MD5 with the right hardware acceleration features present, which are common, but not ubiquitous? I agree on the BLAKE front, though - and I agree with your overall point, there is no good reason to use MD5 or SHA1 anymore.