I'd rather store it as text. Exposing more of your code to null bytes for no good reason doesn't seem like a worthwhile trade off. And if you suggest it's for

I'd rather store it as text. Exposing more of your code to null bytes for no good reason doesn't seem like a worthwhile trade off. And if you suggest it's for performance, a b64 decode is going to be a tiny fraction of your CPU usage compared to bcrypt.