[throwaway4496]

If you have a compression that works on encrypted data, you can avoid wasting your time on the "encryption".

[fc417fc802]

Base64 isn't encryption. The overhead added follows an extremely predictable pattern. That said I've no idea what the performance of common compression algorithms might be in such a use case. The comment was entirely tongue in cheek.

[throwaway4496]

I apologise for my mistake. Either the comment got edited or I misread encryption somewhere in there.