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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

If you only need a single IP from that /24, you can always sub-lease the other 252 usable addresses to other people in the same position as you.

For example, you could set up a company to hold the actual /24 and then have 253 shares in the company, and each shareholder gets traffic forwarded for one IP address.

I'd buy a share or two.

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The minimum usable subnet is /29 (4 addresses), and the minimum subnet that can be announced using BGP is /24.

If all of the users share the same /24 they can use all 254 IP Addresses.

Yes, but how would you move the remaining addresses elsewhere? With a tunnel?

Yeah. Effectively set up a VPN/tunnel service and give credentials to each 'ip-holder'.

With more cost and complexity, that /254 could be anycasted to avoid it being single-homed too.

So you'd basically be running a static IP VPN service, where users would have to pay upfront for the IP, and then pay a monthly fee.

How is this going to be competetive? You can get a Elastic IP from AWS for $3.50 per month when not in use, $0 when in use, and the cheapest EC2 instance is $3/month. And there'd be no $50 upfront cost per IP.

If you route the addresses as /32s, you can use all 256. But you should probably give a discount to the .0 and .255 customers because there's some dumb devices out there that will drop traffic to addresses with last byte of zero or all ones (a misguided attempt to stop smurfing)

Are you saying the GP is effectively correct that /24 is the minimum because of the BGP restriction?

Sure, if you share identical routing with every member of the /24

Or you can blockchain the other 253 addresses!

Perfect scenario for a blockchain

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