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by kstrauser 1615 days ago
Hard disagree. The very first NAT broke a lot of cool things that already existed. Again, think of all the serverless things we could’ve had, like truly end-to-end peer-to-peer messaging that wasn’t routed dispatched through a central routing platform. (We’d still need a locator broker, but that’s far different than piping all content through a third-party host). NAT ruined those entire concepts because the whole concept of “every host is a potential server” went out the window.

Without NAT, we’ve have already made the transition to IPv6 as the creaky old IPv4 wouldn’t have that critical bandaid that helped it limp along. IPv4+NAT can’t die quickly enough.