I'd assume that's because bitcoin seems to use a straight forward hashing algorithm (SHA256) which scales well with processing power only, while scrypt scales memory usage as well.
I've used scrypt style algorithms before for hashing passwords for secure storage, I can make it very expensive to hash a password (say make each attempt take 1/2 a second), and the algorithm can scale up easily as CPU and memory resources increase. So even if someone managed to hack the system and steal the database of password hashes, they won't be able to crack any because rather than passwords stored from SHA1 hashes or something where they can try billions of combinations per second, they can only try a couple per second.
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