I can see an incentive to form a small time ISP as an investment though but that is also quite a hands on investment unlike NFT or some coins where you buy and keep.
No longer true, depending on the RIR and their exact policies. At least RIPE and ARIN see leasing blocks as proper usage. The only thing you might run into a snag with would be if you had zero customers leasing blocks within the region the RIR is responsible for. For example, if you have a /19 assigned to ARIN right now and want to lease it to a European entity announcing it from Europe, you might need to transfer it to RIPE so the proper party gets paid membership dues.
It's certainly more hands on than holding equities (or crypto), much like renting out a few apartments is more effort than simply holding an REIT. Quite doable for anyone with an ISP/infrastructure background and capital to put into acquiring ipv4 blocks. It's actually much easier then renting out real estate (I do both), as it's mostly just jumping on tickets that need you to click a couple buttons every so often. If you find some stable/large lessees, it's more or less set it and forget it for N number of years.
I'm not sure I'd advise people to jump into this market when IPv4 is hitting $50 per address, but I've also thought the "top" was in years ago so what do I know :)
I've pondered for a few years now somehow offering "IPv4 investors" fractional ownership of an LLC stood up to lease out address blocks - I just never had the time to get through the legal/tax complexity of having 50-100 partners all pooling capital. Banks are surprisingly willing to finance these acquisitions as well, assuming you have an industry track record.
You and me both. I sold half my IPv4 holding at $20 (having bought in at $8), and am both annoyed and glad that I only did half, since I can now afford to sell the remaining 25% at a high premium, and maintain my remaining /24 and ASN as a vanity project for many decades.
Define "not used". I know several LIRs that have in excess of /20s allocated to them, and do not advertise their ranges to the (Internet) DFZ, but instead use them on private interlinks between themselves and other third parties.
The only requirement to be given address space by an RIR is a requirement for global uniqueness.
Just because you don't see it on the Internet (or any other network you use), doesn't mean it's not in use.
IPv4 is knocking on death's door, and the value will drop once the DoD gives (6 years) notice that they've migrated all their services to IPv6, thus making 10? /8s available for sale and:
1. flooding the market
2. proving that there's nothing left holding back to run an ipv6-only network, resulting in wide scale migrations for networks that haven't migrated yet.
You can lease addresses:
* https://circleid.com/posts/20210608-leasing-vs-buying-ipv4-a...
The addresses get allocated to Company A which then turns around and allows Company B to use them for a monthly fee and they become routable/pingable.
If someone doesn't have enough in their CapEx budget to buy a block then they can put it into their OpEx.
It is important to keep ARIN updated with any organization name changes, reorganization, or M&A actions as they happen. Going back 10+ years to update those changes, especially if there are several, can be extremely difficult. In large companies the network folks that manage ARIN resources are often not even be aware of those changes until they interact with ARIN again. That has bitten me several times in my career.
In the old days before IPv4 runout they could and would refuse to issue additional IP blocks if you did not show sufficient utilization of your most recent allocation. It was also not unusual for them to reduce the allocation size requested based on how fast you had utilized your most recent block.
But even setting one ape per IP address is still quite hands on and involved investment, you have to know how to do it or you have to hire and pay someone who knows how to do it.
Then you still have some operation cost as you probably cannot assign whole IP block to a single server and keeping server running still costs money.
So I was only think about situation where you simply buy like /24 block and keep it.