Nobody is saying bcrypt isn't a good choice here, they're saying that rainbow tables (and all time-space trades) are made infeasible by salt regardless of whether you're using a good password hash like bcrypt.

But both you & GGP are talking about bcrypt as though it was only a password hash. If someone says, "I'm using bcrypt", then they are using both a password hash and unique per-password salts, or they're not using bcrypt. What makes bcrypt and other such systems nice (and makes this kind of mistake basically inexcusable in 2022) is that if you're using a library or package which implements it (which you should), you don't need to think about salts; you just call GenerateFromPassword(<new_password>) and CompareHashAndPassword(<entered_password>, <stored_hash>) and forget about it.

EDIT: I mean, I understand maybe why in 2006 you used md5 without salt. But a few years ago I when I tossed together my first webapp (a scheduling system for the community I'm involved in), I just googled "password hash" and immediately bcrypt came up as a recommendation; there was a package in my target programming language, so after half an hour of research and 5 minutes of programming I was done. I don't understand how the opensubtitles team, after having had their password database compromised, came up with "use sha256 without salt" instead of "use bcrypt or one of the many libraries which takes care of all of that for you".

I mean, sure, but, notice that you're still way behind state of the art for the end of the 20th century. I blame Tim (Berners-Lee, the man whose toy hypermedia system we're all stuck with because it became popular)

You note that when you googled "Password hash" you got pointed to a decent password hash. But, knowing what questions to ask is half the battle. Too many people figured hey, I should use a cryptographic hash and got pointed to MD5 (or SHA1 or even SHA256) because that's what those are.

The words you should have googled weren't "password hash" but maybe "web authentication" and then the answer is clearly you shouldn't use passwords or any sort of shared secret.

You can have a copy of the authentication database for the toys system I maintain, but it wouldn't help you sign into it because all the information in it is public, a trick we've known how to do in principle for decades, and which works today, on the public Web, with readily available devices (e.g. my phone) and yet, here we are on Hacker News discussing which password hash is best like it's still 1985.

> with readily available devices (e.g. my phone) and yet

I'm pretty sure it wasn't anywhere near ready to use five years ago when I wrote v1 of my webapp. And googling again, it's still not clear whether it would work on whatever random software setup some of my zealous-for-software-freedom colleagues use. With passwords I don't need to worry: if they can render the HTML+CSS (even the JS is optional, because some of my colleagues prefer NoScript), they can log in.

This, _and_ bcrypt is slow. Many wrapping libraries' hashing functions accept an optional parameter to specify just how slow it should be.