Hacker News Reader

I think you've actually reinvented 6to4, or something morally very close to it.

Each v4 address has a corresponding /48 of IPv6 tunnelled to it. The router with that IP receives the tunnelled v6 packets, extracts them and routes them on natively to the end host. This is something that v6 already does, so you don't need to make posts complaining about how dumb they were for not doing it.

View on HN

That's quite true, but in this counterfactual, IPv4+ doesn't pretend that 6to4 is just a transition mechanism to an all-IPv6 future. That is, IPv4+ is as-if 6to4 was the default, preferred, or only mechanism, and core routers were never demanded to upgrade.

It's an edge based solution similar to NAT, but directly addressable. And given that it extends IPv4, I think it would have been much more "marketable" than IPv6 was.

But again, this is all counterfactual. The IETF standardized IPv6, and 30 years on it's still unclear that we will deprecate IPv4 anytime soon.

But we do want a v6-only future, right? We don't want to be running both protocols forever, which is what you'd be asking for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com