@jschauma @ryanc @0xabad1dea Back in 2018 Dave Taht and a few other people tried to reclaim the "class E experimental" address range and most of multicast, which together are about 1/8 of the IPv4 address space.

https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#25-10-2018

The ipv6 stans FREAKED OUT because the only argument their terrible tech ever had was ipv4 exhaustion, largely due to poor initial allocation back in the 1980s (giving korea 64k total addresses, for example).

@landley @jschauma @ryanc @0xabad1dea I think #IPv6 would've gotten more acceptance if it was merely a 4x long #IPv4 annotation instead of doing hexadecimals.

• I mean, worse would've only been #base32hex or #base64hex for IPv6 addresses...

@kkarhan @jschauma @ryanc @0xabad1dea Nope, ipv6 is fundamentally flawed because you can't persistently identify an internet access point in a useful way. That's why wikipedia blocked the entire IPv6 address range for anonymous edits. (May still do, haven't checked.)

You could instead have subdivided the port space without ANY protocol change, and done 1.2.3.4.[0-16] to give each NAT user their own 4096 public ports. 1.3.2.4.2 port 80 is a web server on host port 8192+80...

@kkarhan @jschauma @ryanc @0xabad1dea Ahem, [0-15].

As the saying goes: the two fundamental problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

@kkarhan @jschauma @ryanc @0xabad1dea There's only about twice as many people on the planet as there are IPv4 addresses NOW. Increasing the address space by 16x would mean each person (including infants and the illiterate) could have 8 public devices online fulltime without sharing or dynamic provisioning.

Giving each grain of sand in the solar system its own subnet was unmanageable futurism BS to extend the address range to a star trek future with zillions of planets talking via instant FTL.

@landley @jschauma @ryanc @0xabad1dea yeah, the exhaustion problem would've been shoved back with a #64bit or sufficiently delayed by a 40bit number.

Unless we also hate #NAT and expect every device to have a unique static #IP (which is a #privacy nightmare at best that "#PrivacyExtensions" barely fixed.)

• I mean they could've also gone the #DECnet approach and use the #EUI48 / #MAC-Address (or #EUI64) as static addressing system, but that would've made #vendors and not #ISPs the powerful forces of allocation. (Similar to how technically the #ICCID dictates #GSM / #4G / #5G access and not the #IMEI unless places like Australia ban imported devices.

I guess using a #128bit address space was inspired by #ZFS doing the same before, as the folks who designed both wanted to design a solution that clearly will outlive them (way harder than COBOL has outlived Grace Hopper)...

• Personally I've only had headaches with #IPv6 because not only do I only have #IPv4only #Internet but my #ISP refuses to allocate even a singe /64 to me (but has no problem throwing in a free /29 of #IPv4's in with my contract!)and stuff like #HurricaneElectric / #HEnet's #Tunnelbroker fail face first due to #Geoblocking and the fact that #ASNs get geolocated, not their #PoPs...

If I was @BNetzA I would've mandated #DualStack and banned #CGNAT (or at least the use of CGNAT in #RFC1918 address spaces) as well as #DualStackLite!