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Comment by ifh-hn | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely wondering if western governments (UK) will start issuing ipv6 addresses out to citizens as their digital id so they can track them online and offline.

Only half joking, some UK MPs might actually consider this a reasonable thing considering how many ipv6s there are.

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That wouldn't work anyway. IPv6 addresses aren't routable on an address-by-address basis.

Whether it's workable or not it's besides the point when certainly the UK gov gets it in mind to implement.

Yeah but the digital ID could be the 64bit suffix of the IP. Kind of like that horrendous and moronic idea of using the MAC address as the suffix.

But Mobile IP could do it https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6275

It's not at all clear to me that Mobile IP would be viable at the scale of a modern wireless service provider. It amounts to routing all traffic to/from the mobile device through a machine on the network of its "home" IP address. Without some fairly invasive routing shenanigans, this would be disastrously bad for users traveling far from their home network (e.g. a user gone on vacation).

Not that it matters, really. As far as I'm aware, there were never any substantial deployments of this protocol.

I was more responding to OP's tongue in cheek comment about government assigned addresses

Since ipv6 is just a 128-address, you could say any unique national ID is already an assigned ipv6. Heck, if you assign your services a UUID, you have also already assigned them an ipv6.

What makes an ipv6 useful is that you can route to it. Since you will never be connected to the network. The network will never be able to route packets to you, making the whole thing a little pointless.

We're not routable yet. Fairly certain people are trying to create computer/brain interfaces...

I'm thinking the gov issuing you an ipv6 address that you must use to connect to the internet. But it's also you're id too, since nearly all services are either online or getting pushed that way.

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