That sounds like terminal stage capitalism to me. Why would we want every tree in the Amazons to be cybergorized with its own IP? I don't know Rick, 64 ~~kbits~~ bits ought to be enough for everybody, and I'm already risking it.

[–] orangeboats@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Our network architecture has the tendency to waste IP addresses. A subnet may have 10 devices but have 256 IPs (e.g. a /24 network like 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.0.255) - that's 246 wasted addresses. This wastage is kinda unavoidable since we'd need to keep our routing tables from being too fragmented.

With that in mind it is entirely possible for 64-bit addressing space to not be enough, unless we revert to methods like NAT which come with their own disadvantages.

We have already used up about one /11 block of the IPv6 internet. That's 128-11=117 bits. If we replace the standardized /64 subnets of IPv6 with old /24 subnets typical in IPv4 networks, you get 61 bits. That's dangerously close to the upper limit of a hypothetical 64-bit IPv5 internet.

[–] brianorca@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Because bits are not expensive anymore, and if we used 64 bits, we might run out faster than the time needed to convert to a new standard. (After all, IPv4 is still around 26 years after IPv6 was drafted.) Also see the other notes about how networks get segmented in non-optimal ways. It's a good thing to not have to worry about address space when designing your network.