LorenDBIPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember
Being essentially impossible to memorize is one of the worst attributes of IPv6. I memorize and manually type IPv4 addresses all the time and it's super useful.
What would have been your solution to needing more bits? More information is always going to be harder to remember.
Adding two extra bits to each octet, making each octet range from a still memorable 0-1023 rather than 0-255, would result in an addressing scheme 256x larger than all of IPv4 combined. The entire internet works fine even when IPv4 was nominally exhausted. NAT and CGNAT are not sins, they're not crimes, and there's no rational reason to be as disgusted with them as IPv6 fans are. Even then, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't really a true technical problem in the first place, it was an allocation problem. There are huge /8 blocks of public IPv4 space that remain almost entirely unused to this day.
The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own".
CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios.
IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with).
"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.
I don't have your problems with ipv6, and I'm actively using it.
I don't have to rely on extra commercial entities to be able to reach my network.
I did have a problem with hosting my own shit because my ISP by default does cgnat. That cost me an hour of my life to convince a party to give what used to be normal, end to end connectivity.
Wouldn't easy and accessible self-hosting be a major privacy win if that's your primary concern? Sounds much more private to run a Minecraft and Mumble server on an old laptop in a friend group than paying a commercial entity like a hosting provider to know about it and have a back door.
> NAT and CGNAT are not sins
Highly disagree. Middleboxes are a huge problem on global scale and have frozen any innovation below application layer. TCP and UDP even that they are on software not hardware layer cannot be updated or changed, see MPTCP efforts or QUIC giving up and building on top of UDP.
If this is so much privacy problem, IPv6 is there for many years reaching 50%+ deployments in some countries, I bet there should be concrete examples of such breaches and papers written.
> Reaching your own stuff is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale
No address to receive communication - no problem install an app that would proxy it through someone who has the address.
Tailscale/Headscale is great, using it daily, but they are not solution to the huge already build global network created to connect devices not connecting devices because lack of digits. Global is key here.
DNS, Avahi are super usefuler.
Good luck when you're trying to troubleshoot and DNS not working is one of the symptoms. 8.8.8.8 and 4.2.2.x are easy to remember.
It is notable that an IPv4 address expressed as a decimal number has up to 10 digits, the same as a phone number in many countries.
I've been memorizing and typing IPv4 addresses too, but I have enough devices on the network now that I can't remember nearly all the IPv4 addresses.
So then I need to use DNS. At which point it could be IPv6.
I have 56 host entries in my dnsmasq.conf.
Reminds me a bit of S/KEY (RFC1760, RFC2289 and others around the 1990's).
Not because of the encryption element, but the part about representing a 64 bit integer as a six word sequence for usability.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/KEY#Usability).
Also used outside of that for quickly/easily recognising hash fingerprints.
(It's easier to recognise that your fingerprint is "GAFF WAIT SKID GIG SKY EYED" than "87FE C776 8B73 CCF9").
(It also slips some parity in there for good measure).
They should charge a small annual fee and let people reserve a custom word for a given IP. You could even have a small utility on your computer that automatically queries given names to "resolve" to IPs.
they should also charge a reasonably larger annual fee for reserving a short suffix and allow re-selling custom word prefixes..