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Comment by neilalexander | Hacker News Reader

There is no “backwards compatible with IPv4”. If you have to modify the existing packet headers, you no longer have backward compatibility. If you change anything involving how a flow is identified (like the source/address destinations and ports) then you have broken backward compatibility. Firewalls need to understand new address formats, routers need to understand new address formats, end systems need to understand new address formats, BGP needs to be extended to support new address formats.

IPv6 is perfectly viable and it is in many ways cleaner than IPv4 is. It’s just that transition is expensive and apathy is easy.

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> It’s just that transition is expensive

It’s impossible to finish a transition when the old version has no end of life in sight.

>It’s impossible to finish a transition when the old version has no end of life in sight.

The end of life is gonna happen when ipv4 addresses end up being cost prohibitive. They are already some $50 an ip address.

That is gonna be cost prohibitive in developing Countries, who already are making a transition to ipv6.

Increased demand will drive the price up, but that's not end of life.

Developed countries will pay obscene amounts for ipv4 space. Just as they do for shorthand .com domains.

That cost will continuously rise up until migration to ipv6 comes out cheaper and enables access to the developing market as well. At which point it is a business no brainer.

Short .com domains actually have an intrinsic value to their prospective owners though, since the domain is the human-readable address, and a shorter address is more memorable to customers. The version of the underlying network protocol is just an implementation detail that the vast majority of companies (basically everyone besides possibly 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8) would happily drop if it became totally unnecessary.

IPv4 will never disappear, it will just fade into obscurity. (We'll probably be dead and buried long before that time.)

Just like IPX. It's still necessary and in use for some things -- so it hasn't reached its end of life -- but when was the last time you ever thought about it?

By this metric, we still haven't finished migrating to v4.

True. I could see a world where IPv4 is only for legacy, internal systems and it is not routed externally, but that feels like decades away. There would need to be a coordinated effort of major ISPs to turn it off, but why would that happen if people are willing to pay for it?

I'm curious: what still uses IPX in 2022?

I have no doubt there's an internal application running on a Novell server somewhere that we'll never hear about. It's still running on a machine in a closet just like it was in 1997, or possibly imaged and migrated to a VM because nobody wanted to touch it.

Red Alert 2! They never added IP-based LAN play to it.

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