The secure storage of passwords on servers has been a long-standing problem that rears its head again and again (coughAshley Madisoncough). In 2013 a group of security people lead by cryptographer Jean-Philippe Aumasson initiated the Password Hashing Competition (PHC), an attempt to design a new, state-of-the-art password-processing algorithm using the competitive process that gave us AES and SHA-3. This talk looks at the recently-completed PHC process, both from the technical side (it inspired enormous advances in the state of the art in password-processing design) as well as the ins and outs of running a competitive process to select an algorithm that has to withstand attack by CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs (think Bitcoin miners), not to mention a peanut gallery of geeks all over the world. The focus of the talk is more on the mechanisms of the selection process and the decisions and tradeoffs that were made than on the low-level technical details.