IPv8 is just a reactionary response to IPv6 not being "IPv4 with larger addresses" like people who know IPv4 well would prefer.
There would be no reason to adopt it if IPv6 were adopted.
There would be no reason to adopt it if IPv6 were adopted.
And it turns out the simplicity of 'no NAT' still buys you nothing. It's very common for modern systems to run multiple network interfaces with connections having to be juggled between them. In that case, connection and session management falls to a higher level protocol, often in the application.
NAT-based compatibility strategies are widely deployed in the real world (most cell carriers and Google's IPv6-mostly corporate network use NAT to allow communication with the IPv4 world from IPv6 only devices).
Because it wasn’t implemented transparently at the OS. I can’t plug in to my ip6 only network and reach an ip4 address because end user OSes don’t implement clat transparently, even today in 2026, let alone 20 years ago.
news to literally anyone on a mobile internet connection (which is most internet connections!)
My v6 endpoint is unreachable. My v4 one is fine.
Well over half of Google’s traffic is IPv6 in the USA, and it’s recently become over 50% of all Google’s traffic worldwide at weekends.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-... https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
I'd argue it has, but that's not the point. IPv4 is pretty much mandatory for most users of the internet. Yes, individual users probably neither know nor core whether they're on IPv4 or IPv6, but it's so difficult to run IPv6-only that you just wouldn't bother.
Trying to teach someone about how to use ULA vs. GUA only leads to headaches. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the reason why the internet became so ubiquitous was because of NAT -- static internal addressing is pretty much fundamental to an easy-to-use experience. Having multiple addresses on a host only makes things far more confusing, so people don't bother, because IPv4 just works.