[sherburt3]

I think the addresses are a big issue. The address space is just stupid big, I don't understand why we need to prepare for every grain of sand on Earth having a WiFi chip in it.

Most people can pick up calculating subnets in their head in ipv4 pretty quickly and ipv4 addresses are easy to memorize on accident. My brain turns to mush as soon as I start seeing hexadecimal characters in addresses.

[Dagger2]

But subnetting in v6 is so much easier than in v4? And it's specifically because of the hex. You don't even need to calculate it, in your head or otherwise, because you just subnet based on characters:

  2001:db8:42:1xxx::/52
  2001:db8:42:2xxx::/52
  2001:db8:42:20xx::/56
  2001:db8:42:21xx::/56
  2001:db8:42:210x::/60
  2001:db8:42:2100::/64
  2001:db8:42:2101::/64

etc. About the only mildly complicated thing is remembering that leading zeros in a number can be dropped but trailing ones can't (i.e. 1 and 001 are the same number, but 1 and 100 are different numbers), but that's something you should've learnt in grade school already.

[mahboi]

Because devices randomly generate the last 64 bits of the address without coordinating. They need it to be long to avoid collisions.