[cyberax]

> Why don't you want every device to have a public IP?

Suddenly, your smart lightbulb is accessible by everyone. Not a great idea.

> With IPv6, if you want a peer-to-peer connection between firewalled peers, you do a quick UDP hole punch and you're done - since everything has a unique IP, you don't even need to worry about remapping port numbers.

There is no guarantee with IPv6 that hole punching works. It _usually_ does like with IPv4.

[Marsymars]

> Suddenly, your smart lightbulb is accessible by everyone. Not a great idea.

The answer here is kinda that Wi-Fi isn't an appropriate networking protocol for lightbulbs (or most other devices that aren't high-bandwidth) in the first place.

Smart devices that aren't high bandwidth (i.e. basically anything other than cameras) and that don't need to be internet accessible outside of a smart home controller should be using one of Z-Wave/Zigbee/Thread/LoRaWAN depending on requirements, but basically never Wi-Fi.

[zadikian]

Silliness of smart bulbs aside, I would hope the answer is how ipv6 is actually safe for this, not that you should just not use wifi.

[Marsymars]

Well Thread uses ipv6 in a safe way for this, nobody ever complains about how they wish their Thread network only used ipv4. :)

[throw0101c]

>> Why don't you want every device to have a public IP?

> Suddenly, your smart lightbulb is accessible by everyone. Not a great idea.

Why would it be "accessible by everyone"? My last ISP had IPv6 and my Asus (with the vendor firmware) didn't allow it. My printer automatically picked up an IPV6 address via SLACC and it was not "accessible by everyone" (I tried connecting to it externally).

[Aluminum0643]

> Suddenly, your smart lightbulb is accessible by everyone.

A firewall solves that issue, IPv4 or IPv6.

[ryandrake]

A lot of people, even on HN, mistake "addressable" for "accessible".

[XorNot]

It's because router defaults have been bad for a long time and NAT accidentally made them better.

I finally have IPv6 at home but I am being very cautious about enabling it because I don't really know what the implications are, and I do not trust the defaults.