[aboardRat4]

>That is a quite extreme outlier, then. Hardly relevant to the global IPv6 and peer-to-peer conversation we're having here

It's China with it's 1bn of internet users and 2bn+ devices .

If you're happy to exclude half of the internet from your "global peer-to-peer conversation", then you don't need ipv6 either, just use the Chinese IPs for your own purposes, there are plenty of them.

Actually this is the attitude I am seeing from the ipv6 zealots all the time: blatant disregard of reality. Nobody wielding and non-negligible amount of power wants peer-to-peer communication. Companies don't want it, governments don't want it, large masses of people who want a person with a vested interest to be responsible for the link quality don't want it.

What ipv6 zealots don't realize is that ipv6 will not bring them their coveted p2p, because, guess what, incoming connections are to peasant computers are blocked by ISPs by default.

[jdiff]

As I said, p2p benefits even you right now, today, on IPv4, despite your unwillingness to acknowledge it. I've never even owned an IPv6 address in my life, so this mental image you've painted of myself and of our interaction is quite inaccurate.

You've taken this conversation quite far off its rails. This started due to your objection about phone calls not benefiting from P2P connections, which as I said are one narrow use of the overall technology. P2P connections are still useful. Nobody's blocking China. China connects peers, too.

I'd also like you to clarify something for me, earlier you mentioned P2P doesn't work, specifically for calls, specifically for your country, because all calls need to be transported through the FSB. This isn't any sort of accusation, I fully believe you are in China, but I'm curious what the FSB has to do with you in that case?

[lazide]

Oh boy.

You don’t need to allow peer-to-peer connections with IPv6. They’re easier to allow and book keep - but also easier to block. The workarounds for peer-to-peer with IPv4 NAT are extremely difficult to detect and stop (STUN, various proxying setups, etc.). A lot of software does it though, for performance reasons. CGNAT is quite expensive and error prone, and causes a lot of support calls too.

Every ISP router I’ve gotten (US, India, Brazil, Germany) in the last few years had IPv6 AND default block for inbound connections in the stateful firewall. Which is fast, cheap, and easy. And most of my traffic (~90%) ended up being over IPv6 by default in a dual stack environment, with certainly no apparent latency penalty. In most situations, a latency decrease near as I can tell, as I didn’t need to route through someone else’s random servers at first to initiate connections for certain kinds of traffic. And no, I wasn’t torrenting.

The hilarious thing here is what is even the fight about?

There are too many humans on this planet for even one IPv4 address per, and too much traffic/connections to sanely coalesce every thing under CGNAT - and why go through all the trouble, when IPv6 is simpler and faster at an infrastructure level anyway than multiple layers of CGNAT and dealing with all the crazy BS that comes up when you have that much address translation and packet rewriting going on.

Which, notably, is more expensive than the more straightforward stateful firewall stuff anyway.

No one is intentionally going to IPv4 unless they have no choice due to backwards compatibility, and that is an increasingly shrinking pie. In another 5-10 years as the old consumer gear finally EOLs, it’s probably going to only be used for niche backwards compatibility (like RJ11 and the old school telephone system), and corporate use where their EOL timelines look more like 50 years. But pipe over tunnels over IPv6.

Which works great BTW - 90% of my active IPv4 usage is for internal servers using Tailscale, which is all actually transported over IPv6. And it does that because while it can use CGNAT punching tricks with TUN/S, etc. it’s faster to just connect directly (through the firewall rule I explicitly created to allow this).

And that is just because the Tailscale software prefers to display/default copy-paste it’s internal IPv4 addresses over internal IPv6 addresses for some reason, which I’m sure will change at some point.