[saltharp]

When was the last time you tried to memorize (or even type out) a ZFS block pointer address though? The ergonomics don't matter for ZFS, and so what's left to consider is address space exhaustion.

For IPv6, people memorize/type IP address all the time. So the IPv6 designers needed to balance the address space size with ergonomics - and they did this poorly, imo.

[Dagger2]

If you need memorizable IPs, pick something like "2001:db8:2d4f:1::2", which isn't that much longer than the v4 equivalent of "203.0.113.45"+"192.168.1.2". In fact, it's five characters shorter.

Increasing the address space by a factor of 2^96 while still reasonably allowing addresses shorter than the v4 equivalent seems like a pretty good balance to strike, especially when the vast majority of users use DNS or other automatic discovery and thus won't ever interact with them anyway.

[throw0101a]

> For IPv6, people memorize/type IP address all the time. So the IPv6 designers needed to balance the address space size with ergonomics - and they did this poorly, imo.

Most people have a hard time with remembering more than a handful of important telephone numbers (15 digits per E.164), so I don't think 64- (36:31:85:fc:bc:64:21:58) or even 48-bit (da:e1:4d:a5:9d:e7) addresses would be any easier.

And if you don't like the current IPv6 addresses, be thankful the IETF didn't go with RFC 1561:

> General purpose CLNP implementations MUST handle NSAP addresses of variable length up to 20 octets, as defined in ISO/IEC 8348 [11]. TUBA implementations, especially routers, MUST accommodate these as well. Thus, for compatibility and interoperability with OSI use of CLNP, the initial octet of the Destination Address is assumed to be an Authority and Format Indicator, as defined in ISO/IEC 8348. NSAP addresses may be between 8 and 20 octets long (inclusive).

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1561.html#section-4...