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Comment by skuhn | Hacker News Reader

Public auctions (which they didn't use) are currently in the $45-50 per IP ballpark. At that price it's $247.5 million worth of IPs.

At auction the larger networks tend to go for less money per IP since there is a smaller market of people who want and can buy them (you have to be approved by ARIN/RIPE/etc. for the allocation size), which drives the price down.

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The actual number is much higher. Amazon doesn’t publish all their IP addresses in that json, only the ones in use. They have almost double the IPv4 addresses, ie quite a bit reserved for future use. See https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-ipv4-addresses/in...

What's the cutoff for larger networks where the price starts to go down? Would say, a /16 count? Or does that effect kick in as low as, say, a /20?

I think that it starts to have downward pressure at /22 to /20. You can see Hilco's historicals at [1]. Not all purchases are done in public though.

It seems to me like an arbitrage opportunity, since /24 and /23 networks have many more potential buyers. But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it.

Observing things from the buy side, I suspect that IP space is being brought to auction in a slow but steady trickle so as to maintain upward momentum on prices. The price has approximately doubled in the last year.

[1] https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

> But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it.

This hasn’t been my experience in RIPEland since post IPv4-exhaustion. Is this an ARINism?

That's my understanding with ARIN, yeah.

That’s not actually too expensive, considering they make that money back in a few months if all those IP’s are hosting even their smallest server.

It's not like the news of "we have new IPs" instantly drive customers to rent more VMs. They are likely to have a lot of unused capacity for years, which is not paying back for itself.

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