From GP (and my) perspective, the useful part of UUID is that it's 16 bytes. This is usually for formatted as 32 hex digits with dashes in specific places. Th

From GP (and my) perspective, the useful part of UUID is that it's 16 bytes. This is usually for formatted as 32 hex digits with dashes in specific places. The version/variant bits are the pointless part. Of course if you put the 16 bytes on the wire you would still have some encoding (perhaps 22 base64 characters?) that requires decoding/validation, but in memory and in your DB it's just 16 bytes of opaque data.