The arguments in that Q&amp;A look suspect to me - they don&#x27;t seem to be explicit in what a hash needs to defend against, and as a result, <i>any</i> downside is an argument to avoid a strategy, even if that downside is much less relevant than some other upside.<p>The top voted answer has a comment that&#x27;s spot on:<p>I would offer the opposite argument: if one uses a single hashing function which has a 0.1% chance of having a discoverable weakness that would allow an attacker to speed it up by a factor of a million, there will be a one-in-a-thousand chance that an attacker will be able to gain a million-fold speedup. If one used three independent functions, each of which had a 0.1% chance of allowing such a breakthrough, there would be a 0.3% chance of an attacker being able to achieve a 33% speedup, a 0.0003% chance of an attacker getting a 66% speedup, and only a 0.0000001% chance of an attacker... – supercat Jul 13 &#x27;15 at 17:21<p>...getting a million-fold speedup. I would consider the possibility of an attacker getting a 33% speedup as inconsequential compared to the reduction in the probability of the attacker getting a 70%-or-better speedup. – supercat Jul 13 &#x27;15 at 17:22<p>In short: You lose on average (but who care?) but you reduce the risk of catastrophic failure.