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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

My first thought when I read this was, "Why would you sell a /24, it's so valuable!". This was after reading that the whole thing is worth maybe $6,000. Which in the grand scheme of internet things, isn't that much.

But I guess they just aren't as valuable as I thought. Or the price is coming down now that ipv6 is viable.

I wonder what the peak per ip price was.

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I bought a /24 3 years ago (from the same broker as OP) for about $3500. The price is still increasing.

If $6,000 really is the peak then I've been severely overstating the value of an IPv4 address for a long time. :)

Well, the market's been active for a while now, feel free to park your money in underpriced ipv4 if you want.

I think the idea is not that ipv4 is underpriced, but not worth as much as we thought...

I honestly thought they were worth more than that as well. I've been surprised by the ability to lease a static IP from my ISP for $5/mo for years. I just assumed that they had a surplus, and that was simply the current market clearing price on a surplus they didn't want to outright sell.

Still, if you want to talk about deflationary value store, you could probably do worse than buying IPV4 addresses... :)

If you come to think of it, $5/mo is an outrageous price. You can rent an Amazon LightSail VPS for $3.5/mo, which comes with a static IP address.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Elastic_IP_Add...

Pricing is about the same and it's guaranteed to you, not to a instance that may get shut down

They are actually free per that link.

> You can have one Elastic IP (EIP) address associated with a running instance at no charge.

Hetzner Cloud rents out static IPs to use with any instance for €1 per month. Less than a third of AWS but obviously not very useful if you don't use Hetzner Cloud otherwise.

Mentioned in the post, he had a class C, which is 254 addresses. At $23 an address yes only $5,842.

> 254 addresses.

  2 ^ (32 - 24) == 256

There are 2 reserved addresses in a /24 that can't be used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Addresses_ending_in_0_or_...

While that's true you still pay for them and there are some circumstances where they would be used.

Those addresses are reserved if you subnet the /24 as a /24. You can use them if you use the IPs either as /32s or /31s.

Some platforms may choke on this. I have no issues personally with .0 and .255 used on my network as routable host addresses.

Or indeed go larger. In the middle of a /23 or /22 pop your client IP on x.x.x.0 and gateway on x.x.x.255 and see some poor tools cry.

I'm a network engineer. IPs ending in .0 and .255 CAN be used and quite commonly are.

(I appreciate the downvotes from the clueless who don't know this, however.)

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