Yeah, that's smart. There's no need for everything to be uniquely identified on the internet anyway, right? Why would someone halfway around the world need to be able to ping my smart fridge after all?

Even for tech support purposes, people shouldn't have the ability to directly test my appliances firewall capabilities.

Actually, now that I've done the math, why not just extend IPv4 into hexadecimal?

Once again, none of the current addresses would change with this change, but it would turn 60 billion possible addresses (12^10 = 61,917,364,224) into 184 quadrillion addresses (12^16 = 184,884,258,895,036,416).

I feel like that would give us plenty of wiggle room. Sure, it's not on par with ipv6's ability to assign a unique address to every atom on the planet 100 times, but I think it would be enough for the next 40 years or so, right?

And it's inherently backwards compatible, what's not to love about it?