[hinkley]

I think 1 IP address per human was short sighted. We ran out before the human population doubled. But I think a billion per human was someone liking powers of two, and nothing more. “Ipv5” with 48 bit addressing would have done pretty well. As 6 octets or 4 base 12. For humans you could reserve all ambiguous addresses and have about 50k times as many addresses while people sort themselves out. You could still be able to see at a glance that they were ipv5 addresses. 1047.258.300.0/24

[scythe]

v4 was 32-bit, v6 was 128-bit. I think that 64 bits is a more obvious happy medium.

Conveniently, 2^13 = 8192 allows you to use most of the information available in four decimal digits. And 64 = 13•5 - 1 means that you get a roughly even division into five address tiers (with either the first or last one half the size). 4095.8191.8191.8191.8191 is a bit worse than 255.255.255.255 but not nearly as bad as ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff.

[hinkley]

Slightly less annoying than 48 bits, too. Good points.