[parliament32]

And oddly enough, this seems to be happening all over again with ipv6.

My company has a /32 ipv6 space. That's 79228162514264337593543950336 /128s. And we got it by... just asking for it.

I know everyone's shouting about "there are enough IPs for every atom on earth!" but just like "no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet", maybe we'll need more IPs in the future becuase of some unforeseen development... it seems silly to be handing out blocks like this just for giggles.

[cesarb]

They thought of that; the current allocation scheme will be used for IIRC only 1/8 of the IPv6 address space. If that's ever exhausted, there's still the other 7/8 which can be allocated in a more conservative manner.

[nikeee]

People start encoding information in IPv6 addresses because the address space is so huge. This however, could lead to address shortage.

There was an article about this recently on the German news site Heise: https://heise.de/-4196981

Translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

Yeah, we can only give out 4,294,967,295 more /32s to large companies.

[nolok]

So to take a known scale, there is not enough to give one to each person alive. Which might seem crazy but then again, why would everyone not only need an ipv4, but need several (phone, computers, watch, tv,...)? Crazy

[gvx]

That seems wasteful, but that is the equivalent to getting a single IPv4 address by asking for it, and the IPv4 shortage wasn't caused by the distribution of individual addresses. It's a world of difference to getting a /8 by asking for it.

[nolok]

We would still have ipv4 shortage that way though, not enough to give one to everyone, let alone the several we need. Same here, this might seem a crazy problem to worry about, but they're handing out ranges of size large enough that there isn't enough to give one to any person alive.

[TeMPOraL]

Apparently not for every atom. The space is small enough to save us from grey goo scenario, at least until nanobots invent NAT.

https://xkcd.com/865/

[BillinghamJ]

I believe it's more like every atom in the universe. Which means that inherently it is enough. But indeed it is still best to be somewhat careful.