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Comment by AndrewGaspar | Hacker News Reader

Does this take into account that we're creating devices that connect to the Internet at an increasing rate? :)

https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-calc.htm

And the huge blocks which are assigned without any good reason?

I was also wondering this. For example, they were talking about the debunked idea of solar panel roadways. If something like that took off in the future, literally every panel would require its own ipv6 address.

Perhaps we can at least make it until solar systems no longer exist.

> For example, they were talking about the debunked idea of solar panel roadways. If something like that took off in the future, literally every panel would require its own ipv6 address.

Hardly a problem. According to [1], there is 64,285,009 km of roadway in the world. So every meter of road in the world could be addressed with merely a 36 bit integer:

  64285009*1000 = 64,285,009,000 < 2^36 = 68,719,476,736

Remember that with every additional bit, the address space doubles. Exponential growth is insane.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...

Why do they need an Internet connection at all? Even if they do need to be connected to the Internet, why can't they connect through NAT?

NAT is a hack that was created due to a lack of addresses.

Because NAT is a hack to cope with IPv4 address space exhaustion. The main benefit of using IPv6 is that it allows you to get rid of NAT.

That might be, but it's a hack that works pretty well on a lot of real-world systems.

If you think that, you've not read the details of any NAT traversal schemes that aren't uPnP.

Which would be fine. Even if you covered the entire earth with 1 square millimeter solar panels, you could give each of them about 66 quadrilion IPv6 addresses.

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