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Base64 has been around forever, and hex has significantly lower information density than it - consistently more than 30% smaller.

As for doing something horribly wrong, I dunno, ensuring literally billions of moms and pops can exchange baby pictures by e-mail, for the first time in human history, and doing so since the time when we were using 33.6kbit modems, that seems like a resounding success.†

† Yes, if e-mail had not paid such close attention to compatibility, and just ripped up every old standard on every chance it got (i.e. pretty much like any technology invented since the commoditization of the web), interoperability would never have happened. Legacy crap is fundamentally a part of that success, and Base64 is fundamentally a part of making those hacks practical for the technology we had at the time††

†† To head off an obvious counterargument: yes, there are contemporary examples of why this strategy is still important (it's, so far, the only one that has ever worked in the decentralized environment of the Internet), and is very likely to come in useful in future, time and time again

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>>> import random,zlib,codecs >>> sample = random.getrandbits(1024).to_bytes(1024, 'big') * 1024 >>> len(zlib.compress(codecs.encode(sample, 'base64'))) 22083 >>> len(zlib.compress(codecs.encode(sample, 'hex'))) 4326 >>>

>>> sample = os.urandom(1024) * 1024 >>> len(sample.encode('base64')) 1416501 >>> len(sample.encode('hex')) 2097152 >>> len(sample.encode('ascii85')) 1310720 >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('base64'))) 82169 >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('hex'))) 12537 >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('ascii85'))) 8212

>>> sample = ''.join(sorted(open('/usr/share/dict/words').readlines())) >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('ascii85'))) 1320809 >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('base64'))) 1116678 >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('hex'))) 880651

>>> import urllib.request,zlib,codecs,base64 >>> hamlet = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2265/pg2265.txt").read() >>> len(codecs.encode(hamlet, 'base64')) 248577 >>> len(codecs.encode(hamlet, 'hex')) 368018 >>> len(base64.a85encode(hamlet)) 230012 >>> len(zlib.compress(codecs.encode(hamlet, 'base64'))) 102788 >>> len(zlib.compress(codecs.encode(hamlet, 'hex'))) 88827 >>> len(zlib.compress(base64.a85encode(hamlet))) 121364