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Comment by magila | Hacker News Reader

What we really need is a killer app that requires end-to-end connectivity. Users have little reason to care about IPv6 right now because the existing ecosystem of services has evolved around the constraints of NAT. As IPv6 deployment expands hopefully we will reach a point where some great new application becomes economically viable.

My biggest fear is such an application not emerging quickly enough. Without an imperative from users for end-to-end connectivity there's a risk that IPv6 networks which somehow break it become entrenched. If that happens we are back to the old chicken-and-egg situation: Users don't care because there's no app and there's no app because the network is broken and operators don't care.

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My ISP (Verizon FiOS in NYC) does not offer IPv6 support at all. Users have asked for years. They've promised it for years. It's still not there. So it's not a matter of users asking. Re switching, I think I have one or maybe two alternatives; I'm not sure if they support IPv6 either, and they have their downsides too.

Any potential killer app is going to have to decide whether they want to lose such users, because I cannot imagine an app that is so compelling that I'd switch ISPs for it. And I'm a person who actually wants IPv6 for its own sake. I certainly cannot imagine, say, my parents switching ISPs over an app (and I'm not sure how much choice they have either).

And if such an app arises, it's going to be easy enough for users to use VPNs - it's already common for people to use VPNs to get to region-locked content or (at least as of a few years ago) play LAN videogames over the internet.

Verizon started customer IPv6 rollout in select areas this autumn.[0]

[0]: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-w...

Some users have asked their ISP for IPv6, but they are in the extreme minority. The average user is obviously never going to ask for IPv6 because they don't know what it is. Really the hope is that users would complain killer app x doesn't work with their ISP, and eventually there would be enough pressure to motivate the ISP to deploy IPv6.

How would the app become a killer app in the first place if a huge fraction of users can't use it?

And my estimate is it probably takes years to roll out IPv6 on a network that isn't ready for it - how would the app remain a killer app until then and not be disrupted by someone willing to run a proxy server?

Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) supports IPv6 and is available in much of New York City.

There are great apps "requiring" end-to-end connectivity. Cryptocurrency clients, various videochat solutions, many multiplayer games, bittorrent clients, etc. They either force you to set up port forwarding (unless they can do it themselves using UPnP), or they use STUN/ICE or any of the other NAT traversal techniques. As a last resort it's often sufficient if enough of your users are reachable from the outside and the rest can connect to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_traversal#Techniques

Exactly. We already have "the killer app". Or several killers apps. But we also have a NAT punching.

And that works. Does it take blood and tears to make it work? Certainly. But not so many to make it infeasible.

Where it would be really great is mobile. It would make voice and video apps so much better if users who trust each other could directly connect without the latency adding rendezvous host. It would also need some sort of authenticated uPnP like protocol for telling the carrier when to allow traffic through their firewall though. I wouldn’t want random hosts to be able to waste my precious battery and bandwidth by sending unwanted traffic for my phone to process and discard.

Consumer IOT devices really should be peer to peer so it just works without the manufacturer having to deal with security issues on the server side. And because there are two types of IOT providers, those that don't want your data nor the security headaches that entails;those whose business model is about spying on people.

If your IOT device doesn't connect to the internet, then there isn't an issue to begin with (peer to peer on IPV4 works great within your own WIFI, and other non-IP protocols on a different frequency are usually a better choice anyways).

If it does connect to the internet, I would rather have the device phone to one server only, and that server handling public access. It's much easier to keep one server secure than millions of devices that are in the hands of customers.

Of course my prefered option are IOT devices talking to one hub I control in my network, and me deciding how I want to expose that hub. But in that case, peer-to-peer communication is a non-issue just like in the first case.

"Users have little reason to care about IPv6 right now"

Uhm, 'users' should not ever have to know what 'IP' even is!

If they do, we have failed.

Most Users of automobiles generally know what a piston or radiator is and how it functions. Even my 74yo mum knows that brake pads squeeze the brake drum and need regular replacement.

> What we really need is a killer app that requires end-to-end connectivity.

That seems unlikely to emerge. Anything you can do with end-to-end connectivity you can do with a server in the middle forwarding packets. Servers are cheap and reliable, so there's very little incentive to get rid of them.

I still like the idea of a peer to peer web, with something like hosting in your own browser. This could be a great alternative fallback network with distributed DNS. Most phones are capable. Energy, speed and security are concerns, but in cracking them you'd probably make the web a better place.

I like that idea too. A lot of geeks like that idea. But ordinary people couldn't care less. All they care about is that their latest instagram photo gets a lot of likes. They neither know nor care what goes on under the hood. Unfortunately, that ignorance and apathy is what drives the market.

I can't really comment about what other's care about and use the web for. I've never met anyone that even uses Instagram!

You can make that work with hole punching, IPv6 isn't a major blocker.

IPFS works okay.

The problem is that if you want to host something usually you want it to be up and reachable 0-24. And that has costs, and p2p can help with that, but the freeloader problem is not trivial. (You need reputation or some other kind of accounting, that requires solving sybil attacks, and possibly global sync/enumeration, both are hard, etc.)

Servers for things like this are expensive and a reason why "the internet" is one of the biggest users of electrical energy. Doing things with extra servers involved in the process always results in an environmental footprint that could be avoided.

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