This is interesting in that if IP addresses are allowed to trade freely (currently 4 quid per IP), I'd argue that we'll never run out of them. And this whole transition to IPv6 may never be necessary.
Doesn't mean they're available at a practical price for most endeavours though. At some point it's going to become cheaper to use IPv6 than to buy from the limited pool of IPv4 addresses. Indeed for some use cases it's already there.
In the next ~20 years there will be tens of billions of things connected to the Internet, vastly exceeding the v4 limitations.
The ability to have unique addresses for trillions of objects, may enable new technologies we haven't yet thought of.
How about every house, or Sim character, in your own virtual reality universe having a v6 ip address? Silly, sure, so what.
It's technologically absurd to stick to such a limited, primitive system as IPv4, with a mere four billion addresses. It'd be identical to arguing that we don't need more bandwidth, storage, transistors, et al. because, seemingly, we already have a lot. When in fact, every time we expand such restrictions, we discover and invent vast new technology fields.
And the notion that v4 addresses should cost any meaningful sum, when we can each have a million v6 addresses for little to no cost - that makes it clear what the right direction is. Plenty should always be chosen over scarcity in computing resources.
So it's not like I can just buy an one or two IP addresses, like I could in a liquid marketplace.
Also help us if the routing manufacturers actually put more than 2GB of memory on the routing engine.
Sorry, best I can do is 2 proquo per IP.
Bad jokes aside, I think the IPv6 thing is for the prospective benefit of sundry bits of hardware hippity-hopping around, which would be price sensitive.