[supakeen]

What is unwieldy about hex strings? If you'd want to solve this perhaps a prefix would be easier?

[richbradshaw]

If you store them as strings instead of binary (which I'm guessing 99% of hashes are), they take up more DB space currently, and passing them round is slower, e.g. as etags etc.

[speedgoose]

I would guess that once compressed, binary represented as hex strings don't take much more space than base64 strings. Probably still a bit more than the compressed binary though.

[dependenttypes]

You won't gain anything by compressing (binary) hashes.

[speedgoose]

Oh yes indeed.

[Dylan16807]

This is about printing, not storage.