Why did Argon2 win the PHC? I've been reading up on Argon2 (and, to a lesser extent, other recent password hashers). I'm trying to understand why it won the competition versus the other finalists, like Catena, Lyra2, Makwa or Yescrypt.

Unfortunately, I don't see much technical discussion on the competition's website. It does link to the mailing list archives, but I can't find the actual mailing list there (although I haven't tried the NNTP option, since I don't have an NNTP client) due to some broken links. I'm unclear if that's a temporary problem, or a permanent one.

I have two closely-related questions, either of which I would be grateful for insight on:


I've been proceeding under the belief that PHC is a well-regarded and competently run competition that is considered to have advanced the state of the art in password hashing. Was there any notable controversy surrounding it, e.g. serious concerns with the panel, submission or winner selection processes?
What were the key factors that led to Argon2 being declared the winner by the PHC panel, compared to the other finalists?
I have been part of several cryptographic competitions (AES, eSTREAM, SHA-3, PHC). In every single one of them, some people worded bitter reproaches and wailed and whined about the unfairness of the selection process. It's just that people are like that, and being very good at cryptography does not prevent smart cryptographers from being basically people.

The mailing-list was hosted on Gmane, which was a free resource maintained by somebody on his spare time. In July 2016 he decided he had had enough of it (he was fed up with recurrent DoS attacks). The PHC mailing-list archives, though, were recovered and put back online by Alexander Peslyak (aka "Solar Designer", who was behind the yescrypt PHC candidate). You can see for instance the winner announcement there.