Not just that, but SHA-256 isn't slow. It's slower than CRC or MD5, sure, but it's slowness isn't a feature like blowfish's is. A single round of Blowfish, by c

Not just that, but SHA-256 isn't slow. It's slower than CRC or MD5, sure, but it's slowness isn't a feature like blowfish's is. A single round of Blowfish, by comparison, takes time to set up the key and IV that SHA256 doesn't; bcrypt compounds that. According to http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html you could check ~6480 bytes of SHA256 in the time that it would take you to just set up your first blowfish check. If you're trying to brute-force an 8-character password, you're looking at 141 cycles per password for SHA256 and 114,950 cycles per password for a single round of blowfish.