[Aeolun]

I'm certain the issue here isn't the dots.

123.123.238.217.110.100.1.1 would still have been perfectly readable.

fdd2:1228:3372:1sdf meanwhile is pretty unreadable even at IPv4 length.

[ninkendo]

I don’t understand… why do you consider the way longer one to be more readable than the shorter one? I find the colon string a lot easier to read, a lot easier to compare at a glance, and a lot easier to memorize.

[throwaway71271]

ipv6 is 16 bytes, so more like

123.123.238.217.110.100.12.255.123.123.238.217.110.100.242.176

[Aeolun]

True, but we probably don’t actually need enough bytes to address all the atoms on the surface of the earth a hundred times over.

[Dagger2]

Good! If we did then we should've made it bigger.

We don't know exactly how many address bits we're ultimately going to end up needing. Our only options are to go for "too big" or "too small". Giving how much effort it takes to deploy a new IP protocol, we should err on the side of having too many addresses rather than too few.