This is, I think, actually a very reasonable argument. The threat model which compels us to use specific strong techniques to hash passwords is very much a last line of defense: If an adversary has got hold of a copy of our database, and the user has chosen a relatively weak password that&#x27;s vulnerable to rainbow tables, and they have reused that password on their banking service, then the fact that their password is bcrypted rather than MD5&#x27;d might prevent their bank account getting hacked. Bcrypting all your users&#x27; passwords is a just-in-case-the-worst-happens measure, like issuing a cyanide capsule to a spy - &quot;Alright, you&#x27;ve captured me, but you&#x27;ll never get any information out of me!&quot;<p>But it should be clear that a lot of other stuff has to have gone wrong before it comes to that, and - more importantly, why are we all of a sudden so concerned about whether the user&#x27;s bank account will get hacked? That&#x27;s the user&#x27;s problem, not ours, right? If someone&#x27;s stolen our entire database, things have already got as bad as they can for us - if they&#x27;re also bad for our users, why do we particularly care?<p>Fundamentally, if a user has elected to give us their bank password, why is it on <i>us</i> to protect it with military-grade crypto, when clearly the user doesn&#x27;t think it&#x27;s sufficiently valuable that they kept it secret? And why should we act as if <i>every</i> password someone chooses to use might be a shared credential?<p>It seems you&#x27;re expected to assume that it&#x27;s your duty to protect customers against any loss they may incur on a third party site because they reused a password, if that password is revealed by someone hacking your database.<p>But total DB compromise isn&#x27;t actually the only place in your threat model where you should be worrying about who can figure out a user&#x27;s password. One very good reason for strongly hashing passwords is to make it very clear that your employees who have legitimate access to the database can not themselves discover users&#x27; passwords. This helps maintain the trail of accountability that lets you demonstrate that actions taken by a specific user who logged in with their password were actually taken by that user.<p>In that sense, the real reason for using strong crypto on user-chosen passwords is because they are secrets which belong to the user and which nobody else should be able to find out about. As such we take extraordinary measures to ensure that that secret is kept. That way it doesn&#x27;t <i>matter</i> if their secret is that they use a weak, nonunique password. Indeed, how could you even know?<p>In the Ashley Madison case, of course, it turns out that there are a lot of other secrets that a database can be holding on behalf of a user that should not ever be accessible to anyone else.... but nobody&#x27;s complaining that the activity history of accounts wasn&#x27;t encrypted to protect customers against loss after a total data breach.