[jiggy2011]

Bcrypt has a tuneable "cost function", so you get to decide how hard to make it. It's effectively designed to be slow and hard to do in parallel.

The SHA family on the other hand are designed to be fast, (for checksums etc) so it's possible that later SHA algorithms are actually worse than earlier ones for password hashing.

Modern computers can do a lot of MD5/SHA1 every second so even with a salt, one round of SHA1 is likely to be not very good at all.

You can probably find a significantly large X and do SHA1 enough times to make it slow enough today, but for future-proofing you are better off just using an algorithm that is actually designed for such purposes.

[tryeng]

I'm not saying that that bcrypt isn't a better choice, it is, but some of the "flaws" he is pointing out in that article are just ridiculous. If he's going to argue for something, he should be using correct arguments.