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No reason at all. Novell Netware did exactly this.

The host portion of your address was your MAC. Networks were identified by their local netware servers.

That's pretty much exactly what IPv6 with stateless autoconfig does--network address in the upper 64 bits, MAC address (slightly modified) in the lower 64.

This is one of the reasons why IPX was a bad idea and never took off. Automagical discovery is always great until it doesn't work.

and never took off.

IPX was everywhere NetWare was.

NetWare got into everything, like dust, in the 80s and part of the 90s.

Being prevalent, which it no doubt was, and being pervasive are two different things.

IP has a way of worming itself into every little thing. IPX never really escaped from the desktop network environment.

I did not know that pervasive was synonym for 'took off'.

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