I 100% agree. The IP exhaustion issue could have been sooooooooo easily solved and without replacing it with an IP abundance issue which means tracking bad actors and maintaining blacklists becomes an exponentially greater issue with much more ongoing maintenance required due to the abundance of IP6 addresses making them cheap for bad actors to replace if their last range gets blacklisted.

IP addresses are not so cheap (free) in an IP4 (or IP5 with 5 byte addresses!) world – which is exactly what you want!

If this site had likes I would like your comment a million bazillion times!

Or even if they just changed the IP packet’s version number to 6 instead of 4 and left EVERYTHING ELSE the same. The only difference with an IP 6 packet would be that the target and source IP addresses used 5 bytes (32 bits as you suggest) or even 6 bytes (48 bits) instead of 4 bytes.

It would have fixed the IP exhaustion issue without entering into a “verschlimmbessern” scenario!

They just couldn’t help themselves could they!

I think you missed the main concept – the blocking is never ending with IP6:

The game of “Whack a Mole” you play banning IP addresses (whether individual IP or ranges of IPs) gets infinitely more difficult when there is no scarcity of IP6 addresses. No scarcity is one of IP6’s biggest selling points!

Every person with even the most basic education has heard of how the law of supply and demand determines the price of an item:

When a useful item is scarce its value is very high (e.g. IP4 addresses, Bitcoin or gold) meaning it becomes expensive for a bad actor to just keep buying more and more IP4 addresses as they ‘burn’ their previous ones as they eventually get added to all the blacklists.

With an over abundance an item eventually loses its value (e.g. IP6 addresses or a fiat currency where the central bank just keeps printing more of the stuff) meaning IP6 is a bad actor’s paradise because no matter how many IPs or ranges you or others ban in a blacklist there’s still plenty more so the bad guys can just keep grabbing new IP6 IPs or ranges much less expensively compared to in the IP4 scenario …. and they will …. and the IP6 blacklist game of ‘whack a mole’ will likely become a game that’s much harder to win.

just add one octet on the left, for a total of five. the next address after 255.255.255.255 would be 1.0.0.0.0. eventually you might need a sixth octet on the left. but that day would be a long way off. you would still be able to read, write, and remember addresses. you would still be able to reason about subnets. the router would simply have a nat rule for when an address with the upper bits set crosses the bridge to an ipv4 node. when an ipv5 host happens to have a low-numbered address, its translation to ipv4 would be completely transparent.

imagine if it had been designed for transitioning instead of replacing.

tbh that’s what i dislike about ipv6…if it only gave address space, the transition would be relatively easy to wrap my mind around. but it also adds all this other ‘stuff’ that ideally needs understanding and configuring. the only part of it i’ve learned is ipsec, which i found to be both unusable and redundant to vpn. which i think is just one tiny example of how so much of ipv6 can be rendered irrelevant through use of relatively confined ipv4 hacks

honestly i’m just too lazy to configure separate firewall / forwarding rules for ipv6. even though i think once that’s accomplished, it’ll probably have some benefits (perhaps less NAT). feels like a steep learning curve for something that’s totally optional and useless to me today.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6214

I feel like this could be the removal of the true stumbling block in IPv6 adoption and surely now it can really take off.

For reference:

IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149

IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549