What are the potential security risks of using MD5 and base64 for password encryption in PHP?

Using MD5 for password encryption is not secure as it is a fast hashing algorithm that can easily be cracked with modern computing power. Base64 encoding is not encryption, it is simply a way to encode data in a format that is easily readable. To improve security, it is recommended to use a more secure hashing algorithm like bcrypt for password hashing in PHP.

// Implementing bcrypt for password hashing in PHP
$password = "password123";
$hashed_password = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_BCRYPT);