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Comment by Dagger2 | Hacker News Reader

You're at the very beginning, baby steps stage of inventing IPv6 there.

You aren't the first person to come up with the idea of adding extra bits to IP addresses to make them longer. The problem isn't finding somewhere to stash the extra bits in the packet format (which is trivial; you can simply set the next-protocol field to a special value and then put the bits at the start of the payload), it's getting all software to use those extra bits -- and getting that to work requires doing all of the new AF family, new sockaddr struct, new DNS records, dual stack/translation/tunnels etc etc that v6 does.

Please consider that maybe the people working on v6 weren't actually complete imbeciles and did in fact think things through.

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Please consider that maybe the people working on v6 weren't actually complete imbeciles and did in fact think things through.

It is possible for the world to change, and for designs and plans and viewpoints 30+ years ago to be less correct today.

This world is not that world. That world had massive concerns about the processing cost of NAT. That was one reason for ipv6. It also had different ideas about where the net would go. We now know that the "internet of things" and "having your fridge online", as well as "5G in everything so people can't firewall it off" is just insane and malign.

We also know that tying an IP address to a person (compared to an ISP using NAT) reduces privacy. That devious and devilish actors abound.

Even though they thought these things might be neat, many of them aren't.

> That world had massive concerns about the processing cost of NAT

The processing cost of NAT is still a problem. There's that classic post by a Native American tribal ISP where it was cheaper for them to pay to replace their clients IPv4-only Roku devices with IPv6 capable Apple TVs than to upgrade their CGNAT appliance to handle the video traffic.

You misunderstand.

The concerns about the "processing cost of NAT" were edge concerns. Companies, homes, edge-devices with 100 or 1000 RFC1918 addressed devices behind them. When ipv6 was created, NAT wasn't a thing, as processing power just wasn't there.

And it was thought the processing power would never be there.

Yet now everyone has NAT in little devices at home. So the need to route 100 IPs into every person's home isn't a thing. Which is inline with my comment about how the world looked different 30 years ago, and how the concept of "IPs for everything" is the reverse of what people even want now.

None of that has anything to do with what you said in the post I replied to. "Add an extra octet to v4 addresses" has hard technical barriers to deal with if you want it to work, regardless of what the world looks like or what you're designing for.

> We now know that the "internet of things" and "having your fridge online", as well as "5G in everything so people can't firewall it off" is just insane and malign

None of this is really relevant either. IP's job is to handle the addressing used when sending data over the Internet, and it should do this job well regardless of what people end up doing with it.

> We also know that tying an IP address to a person (compared to an ISP using NAT) reduces privacy

We don't tie IP addresses to people. PI allocations might sort of count, but regular users don't get those.

None of that has anything to do with what you said in the post I replied to.

Of course not, why would it? I quoted what I was replying to, and all of my comments made perfect sense in that context. In that context, I was discussing the winning ipv6's original design considerations, and yes "IPs for everything" was one of them, hence me talking about it.

I intended the quoted part to mean something like "they did consider adding extra octets to v4 addresses and setting those octets to zero to mean v4".

It's not like they weren't able to come up with that idea. It's just that if you follow that train of thought through to its conclusion, you'll either decide it can't work or you'll make enough changes to end up with something that works basically the same way v6 does.

But yes, having enough IPs for everything was obviously a design goal. It would be excessively silly to go through all the work to increase the address size and not increase it by enough to handle whatever people ended up wanting to do with it.

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