[anderspitman]

I've toyed with the idea of buying a /24 as a (probably terrible) investment that I would actually get at least some use out of in the short term (some VPSes like vultr let you bring your own IPs). Anyone have enough experience with this to talk me out of it?

[Thorentis]

With my investing luck, the world would suddenly switch to 100% IPv6 the day after the sale went through.

[mikestew]

If that's all it takes, I'm willing to start the co-op that fronts you the money.

[wahern]

I've been thinking about this for a couple of years, because of SMTP IP reputation, ISP & colocation mobility, etc. When I first looked into it a /24 was selling for $4-5k. Now it's selling for $6-7k. See, e.g., https://auctions.ipv4.global/

AFAIU, IANA will only transfer blocks to a business entity, so if you're serious about it you might have to first start with that.

[bibabaloo]

In a similar vein, is there a cost effective way to purchase a single ipv4 address? Just for the novelty I think it'd be cool if I could spend ~$100 to have an ipv4 address that's permanently mine.

[fanf2]

The minimum IPv4 allocation is a /24 because that is the smallest network that can be globally routed. Smaller networks are filtered out of BGP to stop routing tables getting too big too fast. Anything smaller than /24 has to be rented from a network provider who will advertise an aggregate route covering many customers.

[jlgaddis]

I've got plenty I'm not using, I'll give you one.

Here, this one's an easy one to remember, you can have it:

  127.1.

Enjoy!

[pera]

AFAIK you need to demonstrate a real need to actually acquire a block, this is not like buying a domain name.