Basically the extent of my IPv6 knowledge

renzev@lemmy.world to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 342 points –
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IPv6 is also eventually going to hit exhaustion

Top-tier trolling right here.

I'm sorry but how? We have appliances with dockerfiles, micro containers for remote controls, extensive botnets of virtual machines, centuries in the future when we have expanded into the solar system and trillions of humans all having millions of unique applications with addresses, it's inevitable to hit a finite number. When every square meter of smart road has an routable address; we will likely be rewriting networking anyways. The only players pushing IPv6 transition are networking companies because a new standard requires new hardware.

IPv6 has a total of 3.4E+38 addresses, and the entire surface area of the earth is 5.1E+14m². If we divide those two, then we find that you can have 6.7E+23 addresses for every square meter of your Saharan desert or Pacific Ocean smart roads. If civilization doesn't collapse due to nuclear wars or climate catastrophes and we actually do make it to the stars, I doubt that we would still be using the centuries-old and deprecated internet protocol.

IPv4, in contrast, has 4.5 billion addresses, and there are currently 8 billion humans on Earth. While not every of them lives in the parts of the world with internet, that number will most likely soon shrink to nearly nothing. When everyone and their dog has a smartphone, laptop, desktop, console, smart TV et cetera, that 4.5 billion doesn't seem nearly as big as it first once seemed to be.

This isn't a Y2K-scale problem that will summon armageddon if we don't solve it immediately, but our current solutions to the overflowing IPv4 addresses are well-polished hacks at best. IPv6 will ensure end-to-end connectivity for many years to come.

So, yes a few pieces of land mass tech such as smart road or solar paneling and we hit the theoretical limit of IPv6. And we currently dont need the addresses. So glad that you agree