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I always thought to start they should have just allowed each octet two-ish more bits, so you could have 999.999.999.999. I know it’s the hackiest of all hacks, but it sure would have been an easy upgrade from the software perspective. And it would have given about a 256x increase in the number of ips. Which I kinda think actually might have served us for a long time.

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And where do those two extra bits go? How do existing routers that don’t know anything about two extra bits route those packets? Here’s the ip packet header: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IPv4_Packet-en.svg

In this thread, lots of people seem to think in terms of 255.255.255.255 and fail to recognize the IP address is 32bits and the textual representation of 4 octets means very little.

But the confidence and armchair expertise offered… wow.

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