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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

Explain. IPv4 takes time to understand too (e.g. subnetting) but it's more common so people deal with it much more.

Understanding how to read/write an IPv6 address is WAY more complicated than for IPv4. That barrier to entry alone likely prevents a lot of casual adoption. You can come back that IPv6 isn’t all that bad, but the real world adoption rate amongst individuals, even skilled hobbyists, speaks for itself.

I'm not that sure on how an adoption rate of 30-35% speaks for itself?

https://www.google.com/intl/ru/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...

Maybe you mean that the increase in adoption is too slow, and I agree to that, but change always takes more time than we want, specially when there isn't clear financial incentives.

ipv6 is today older than the internet was when it was invented.

That’s why I said among individuals, specifically hobbyists. Sure, companies that consume vast quantities of IPv4 addresses have an economic incentive to use IPv6, so you will see some adoption. But the reason there is such a long tail is because the cost of adoption (learning it) is higher than the supposed benefits for most individuals and small corporations.

That is probably the silliest argument against IPv6 you can make. Just look at the header structure and IPv6 becomes pretty clear. And without old cruft that IPv4 is burdened with, I would argue IPv6 is easier to grok.

The ideal situation for both IPv4 and IPv6 is to not have to deal with raw addresses. If you are reading IP addresses over the phone or in a ticket to connect to computers on a regular basis, your company did IT on the real cheap and is likely suboptimal in many ways except for amount of money spent on IT.

Not as much, you could learn the basics on ipv4 in two to three 4 hour classes of study - assuming you know how to convert between binary octal and decimal.

The same is true of IPv6? There is really nothing deeply magical there that takes forever to understand.

Maybe be a bit more concrete about what's so much more complicated about IPv6 than IPv4..

What I am seeing here mostly is the biggest problem is that you can't hold an IPv6 address in your head. Ever.

I can look at an v4 address then 15 seconds later look at another address and know they are different. That's not possible with v6.

So I think people are conflating "difficult to wield" as "more complicated".

If you only use autoconfiguration perhaps, but for manually assigned addresses it's really not too bad since one can structure them in a logical way (which would be extremely expensive to do in the IPv4 case).

If you are a company you can get your own IPv6 space and can structure things hierarchically: <company prefix>:<site>:<vlan>::<hostnumber>.

And in fact I can remember more IPv6 addresses for hosts than IPv4 addresses for the same hosts right now.. so there is that.

And yet I have fe80:: in my head and 2001:db8:: in my head (as well as my own /32). I don’t have the documentation prefix (if one even exists) for IPv4 in my head.

It’s harder, but “can’t... ever” and “not possible” are not true for everyone.

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