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Comment by Bluecobra | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that, but I think we're going to see more and more companies to sell off the unused blocks. Last year MIT sold off 1/2 of 18.0.0.0/8 to Amazon.

It looks like the going rate per IP is between $20-$24 currently:

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

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That's a good point...further scarcity will drive the prices to a point where selling is very attractive.

ipv4 is the new bitcoin?

Don't know how credible it is, but these folks were predicting the current ~$20 price goes to ~$50 over a year's time:

Chart: https://www.retevia.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IPv4-Pric...

Article: https://www.retevia.net/address-pricing-2019-and-beyond/

Yeah, I think there will be a small bubble as some try and buy all they can while we continue to transition to ipv6

Has a date been set for when IPv4 will stop being routed?

No, because the Internet is a voluntary system.

Very few companies would need to decide to not interconnect with IPv4 networks before IPv4 was effectively dead. Typically, though, there's a process that they would go through before making that move. That's what I was asking about. Has anybody floated a date for IPv4 death?

Those very few influential people who make the decisions are incredibly conservative; they won't even kick criminals off the Internet without overwhelming evidence. I don't think they're even interested in discussing IPv4 sunset at this point.

Rather than a date I think it would make sense to look at the traffic. When IPv4 hits, say, 1% it might make sense to turn it off. I would estimate that's decades away.

Google is one of those influential companies and I could totally see them declaring that their crawler is going to stop visiting IPv4 after some date.

They would do that only once it costs them more money than they could make with the retrieved data. That's not going to happen anytime soon.

You might as well wonder whether google is actually going to stop crawling IPv6 addresses (are there any significant IPv6-only servers?)

That's true. However, even if they just said IPv6 destinations will be used in the ranking algorithm as a positive indicator of a site that's being actively maintained, that alone would be enough to get some people moving.

It's a big gamble on when to sell though. Eventually IPv6 adoption will hit a critical mass threshold and interest in paying for IPv4 IPs will dry up.

GE did the same thing. It sold 3.0.0.0/8 to amazon about a year ago.

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