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Comment by RiverCrochet | Hacker News Reader

IPv4s are about to be bought, held, portfoilo'ed, speculated, and rented/mortgaged/sold like real estate. Companies like IPXO are already doing it. The costs of public IPv4's are going to go up for no technical reason because a new distinct ownership layer is springing up between you and the ISP. You're going to start renting them or paying a holder for the right to use them (on top of your ISP to transport it) at some point. And you can continue to do that, or get IPv6's for free.

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Just to be pedantic, it's "illegal" to hoard IPv4 or to buy it for any purpose other than using it directly. But yeah, in the real world it may become more financialized than it already is. OTOH if prices keep dropping maybe they won't bother.

Relatedly, I've been seeing some people buying up old domains and squatting on them with AI generated content. Not even ads, but content that seems like something that might actually show up in a rare Google search query. Not really sure what the play is or why this is better than advertising the domain for sale (do registrars punish overt squatting these days?).

Ford Motor Company has both a /8 and a /9. They own over 16 million ip addresses.

IPv4s have been bought and sold for years

https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

Prices have been going down in nonimal terms for years, let alone real terms. In terms of investment they're a terrible asset.

IPv6 and CGNAT growth has finally started to suppress IPv4 prices. There was a huge pump when hyperscalers decided they needed more. But IPv6 keeps growing and is the majority of traffic in many networks. If you own significantly more IPv4 addresses today than you need, I would dump them on the market yesterday. Spend some of the profits to move to IPv6 if still needed.

nice. I wish I could buy an address instead of renting from aws...

It seems like the addresses cost about $20 each, and can be rented out for ~$5/year.

That doesn't seem terrible.

How does one get an IPv6 allocation for free? Or, do you mean the ULA space? Because the latter doesn't really count.

You just ask your RIR. For example: https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/

Looks like that's only for organizations. Even "end users" have to meet the requirements:

>Have an IPv4 assignment from ARIN or one of its predecessors

>Intend to immediately be IPv6 multi-homed

>Have 13 end sites (offices, data centers, etc.) within one year

>Use 2,000 IPv6 addresses within one year

>Use 200 /64 subnets within one year

Seems like they discourage individuals from getting allocations for their own personal use.

Yeah. If you're not an ISP or other LIR yourself, the correct path is to ask your ISP or a third-party ISP for a provider-independent allocation. This costs a nominal fee, about $50 per year.

I only know anything about RIPE policies but I gather the PI address processes and fees are very similar between RIPE and ARIN. RIPE has many members that are willing to handle address allocations for the RIPE fee plus 20% (so 60€ per year) and without bundling any other services.

I'd really like minimum service requirements to be mandated by law.

E.G. Comcast should be REQUIRED to give my OWN router a /56 or better, not a /60 because they waste a whole nibble of netmask at the cable modem which will _never_ talk to anything other than Comcast or my own Gateway.

this depends on your RIR. RIPE has far less strict requirements.

A link to a non-commercial guide for IPv6 allocation would be appreciated here.

I've written such a guide: https://jlsksr.de/docs/isp-guide/

The official docs of the RIRs are "non-commercial guides for IPv6 allocation", too.

In the end you're still just asking for a block, you don't pay for it. There are requirements which vary from RIR to RIR, sure, but there were requirements for requesting blocks in IPv4 as well originally.

Ultimately, as a regular person requesting IPv6 space you'd just ask your ISP, which can get practically as much as they want for free by submitting these kinds of requests. Meanwhile, for IPv4 space they're going to have a harder and harder time getting you additional space and chances are be unwilling to give it free/cheap.

> as a regular person requesting IPv6 space you'd just ask your ISP

In real life these requests don't lead to IPv6 allocation, no matter how they're asked or how often. Here are a few of the responses I've received just this year.

    "At this time we are not able to provide a IPv6 unfortunately."
    "We regret to inform you that, at this time, we do not offer IPv6 support."
    "I wanted to inform you that IPv6 is currently not available"

My current ISP went as far as dumping their own IPv6 allocation. Three weeks ago it stopped being advertised in their ASN. Which I suppose is their way of telling me to stop asking.

Past that: Over 15yrs of asking various ISPs (large and small) to make allocations available, none of us ever budged the IPv6 needle.

My mobile operator and my ISP at home both provide IPv6 connectivity without me asking. All I had to do was to enable IPv6 on my router.

> My mobile operator and my ISP at home both provide IPv6 connectivity without me asking. All I had to do was to enable IPv6 on my router.

I think this is representative of every IPv6 deployment. You get it or you don't. If it isn't available to you, asking won't make any difference.

FTR we have 6 wireline ISP here. Cable has IPv6, the 5 fiber operators do not.

right above that is says: "If you meet any of the criteria below, you qualify to receive IPv6 address space:" (emphasis added)

Unless they're very lax about what constitutes multi homed I meet zero of those requirements.

Does me renting a server in a DC count as multi homing? Bridging my network to my friend's place over wireguard? Doubtful tbh

Typically, multi-homing means having an ASN and using BGP, or having multiple providers with BGP announce your prefix. So, a server in a DC might count, if you can get them to announce your prefix, though they'll probably want to announce their own prefix and give you a chunk of it. Your home network probably isn't going to be announcing your prefix.

It really depends on what you're trying to achieve by having a direct IPv6 allocation...

Maybe I just want a /48 or something, to do whatever with.

If, as ARIN claims, ipv6 scarcity is not an issue then it's very frustrating to deny me the ability to get my own chunk of space for my own purposes.

It shouldn't matter what I plan to do with it.

I hear what you're saying but if you aren't going to publicly route those IPs, ARIN has allocated fd00::/8 for that use. If you are going to publicly route your IPs, ARIN has no problem allocating you the space.

I'm a networking noob, but would it be possible to extend DNS/HTTPS so as to allow a URL to point to a port other than 443? Doing so would allow each IP address to serve multiple websites/computers making the pool of addresses at least thousands of times larger.

That’s sort of what HTTP is already doing though no?

Multiple websites can have the exact same DNS record and live on the same physical server / IP address, but the HTTP(S) request must specify what host name it is actually requesting, so the server knows how to serve it.

It is already possible using the Host header and TLS SNI. But traffic still flows through port 443.

As others have mentioned, there's SNI and host headers to have multiple sites on port 443, but there is also the SVCB/HTTPS aliases (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9460) which will allow having the plain domain alias to other hosts including ones with embedded port numbers. Non-browser support is pretty lacking though.

We own our own IPv4 and IPv6 ranges, which is nice. There already is a holder for the US: ARIN.net and I hear it's a pretty spendy annual fee for most orgs (we're legacy. we've had ours for decades)

Now all we need is for someone to make a crypto currency so you can fractionally own IPv4 addresses.

Presumably this would be port-based fractional and 443/tcp would cost a premium.

It's already possible to "split" a frontend HTTP server on a given IP and port to arbitrary backend IPs and ports via the Host header and reverse proxies.

I was thinking it was more of a "more than 50%" ownership controls the routing tables. Love the chaos.

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