Waste will kill ipv6 too

Thu Dec 28 19:14:06 UTC 2017

Just an interjection but the problem with this "waste" issue often
comes down to those who see 128 bits of address vs those who see 2^128
addresses. It's not like there were ever anything close to 4 billion
(2^32) usable addresses with IPv4.

We have entire /8s which are sparsely populated so even if they're 24M
addrs that's of no use to everyone else. Plus other dedicated uses
like multicast.

So the problem is segmentation of that 128 bits which makes it look a
lot scarier because 128 is easy to think about, policy-wise, while
2^128 isn't.

My wild guess is if we'd just waited a little bit longer to formalize
IPng we'd've more seriously considered variable length addressing with
a byte indicating how many octets in the address even if only 2
lengths were immediately implemented (4 and 16.) And some scheme to
store those addresses in the packet header, possibly IPv4 backwards
compatible (I know, I know, but here we are!)

And we'd've been all set, up to 256 bytes (2K bits) of address.

If wishes were horses...but I think what I'm saying here will be said
again and again.

Too many people answering every concern with "do you have any idea how
many addresses 2^N is?!?!" while drowning out "do you have any idea
how small that N is?

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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