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It's up to the site operator to tune the cost; it's generally recommended 100-250ms depending on how much you're willing to make your users wait.

FWIW there are ASICs now that will get orders of magnitude faster hash throughput than your servers.



This is true, except for scrypt, which is very tough to make ASICs for. As for bcrypt, it's true that ASICS can go very fast, but you ultimately have a massive advantage as defender here. An attacker needs to try billions of combinations per hash, but you can simply take a whole second of CPU time (scaled to your current load, roughly) if you want -- that's not a lot for a user, but for an attacker taking several billion of even half a second makes cracking very, very hard.




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