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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

People get caught up in how many IPv6 addresses exist, as if we will always have enough to go around. Recently Capital One was assigned a /16, enough for every ATM in the US to be its own ISP and make its own customer allocations. We continue to repeat the same mistakes that made people believe we needed v6 in the first place.

We will never run out of IPv6, but I believe in my lifetime you won't be able to get new v6 allocations anymore because they will have all been handed out to the large corporations with deep pockets. Oops, no addresses left - but you can rent one from a cloud provider for a few dollars a month.

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> We continue to repeat the same mistakes that made people believe we needed v6 in the first place.

The IPv6 designers already thought of that and prepared for that eventuality. Only 1/8 of all available IPv6 addresses (the ones starting with the bits 001) is available for allocation under the current rules. If and when that gets exhausted, there will still be more than 5/8 of all IPv6 addresses available to be allocated under more strict rules. (See https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-add... and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3513.html#section-4 for more details.)

Do current routers deal with other addresses correctly? This reminds me a little of the challenges in reclaiming 240.0.0.0/4 [0].

[0] - https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/class-e-addresses-in-the-rea...

> Only 1/8 of all available IPv6 addresses (the ones starting with the bits 001) is available for allocation under the current rules.

Yes yes yes, all sorts of really super serious policies were put in place to prevent abuse of IPv4 allocation rules too.

Then, we’ll make IPv8, with 2^1024 address, which will be incompatible with IPv6 and IPv4 and all software on release, and will take decades before any appreciable uptake. Addresses will use hexadecimal, as well as the entire 4-byte Unicode table of emoji and Egyptian hieroglyphics, with octet separated by $ and { symbols for heightened readability.

No, we won't do that.

I believe IPv8 does something else:

https://py-ipv8.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

IPv8 dev here. Thnx for mentioning this.

IETF draft standard of IPv8: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-pouwelse-trustch...

Bonus: "De-DSI" == LLM- based fuzzy search + IPv8

The time the think of deploying IPv8 is BEFORE you've deployed something else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYo0lVVH2wU

Yet there will still be comments asking why IPv8 can't be IPv4 with another few sets of digits tagged onto the end, as if that would somehow be compatible with the current implementation of IPv4.

I swear it is easier to argue with flat earthers than with people who want IPv4 but with more addresses.

I just hope that by making the joke, I won't accidentally make fetch happen :-D

A /16 is the first quarter of the network prefix. That is indeed like assigning an IPv4 /8 to General Electric in 1985 and then wondering why, 40 years later, we’re out of address space.

You’re leaning heavily on “like” here. The address spaces are different. That’s the point.

Except, we're not actually "out" out. There is a very active IPv4 transfer / resale market. There is a LOT of unused or underused address space out there. I know one local firm with a completely unused /16 that they have not announced in years.

> Recently Capital One was assigned a /16

So besides the bad design ipv6 is also badly managed?

Wait until you see IPv4

So why does 6 have to repeat 4's historical (and very publically recorded) mistakes?

People thought there was not enough bureaucracy and wonder why it's not improving after adding bureaucracy.

No, it's ARIN that's badly managed.

Capital One would never get a /16 in RIPE.

Thanks, I missed this story. According to https://old.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/17yuqvp/til_capital_o..., the largest allocations by RIRs other than ARIN do not exceed /19, and those are for national telecom providers. Who are these ARIN people and how can they be held accountable for their idiotic management of public resources, which appear to be consistently terrible for decades?

The IPv6 address space is so huge, I, as an individual, was able to get a /44 no questions asked. Back in the 90's, I was able to get a IPv4 /24, no questions asked.

There are only ~16.7 million /24s in IPv4 whereas there are more than 2000 /44 for every person living on planet earth, it’s really a different scale.

/44 is nothing. It’s 16 /48s.

I have a /32 as an individual that I also got no questions asked.

It’s more IPv6 space than I could ever use.

I understand it's "nothing", but it's also more I can ever use!

If we measure it in /64s, yeah, it's definitely more than you could ever use.

However, IPv6 space has to be measured in /48s, and IPv4 in /24s, as those are the smallest possible BGP announcable blocks.

With IPv6 there's also an unwritten rule that RIRs will only assign blocks ending on a nibble boundary (with the exception of RIPE and their /29s that they expand by one bit every time you run out).

So a /44 is on the second smallest nibble boundary, making it the second smallest allocation possible.

Yep! But realistically I'm just one dude with a home network and a few VPSes doing BGP. How many /48s do I need? I was experimenting with traffic engineering so I did announce some /48's out of the /44 but that got old pretty quick.

> But realistically I'm just one dude with a home network and a few VPSes doing BGP. How many /48s do I need?

Well, if the VPSes are in seperate sites, at least one per VPS, which means at least 2, which means that according to allocation policies, at least a /44. :)

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