

Slashdotters defend IPv6 from UK blogger who still thinks its no big deal - Halienja
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/18/1610230/Why-You-Shouldnt-Worry-About-IPv6-Just-Yet

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nanairo
What data can you bring to show that we won't run out of addresses any time
soon? It would seem that we have around 15-20 months left [1]. Given the scale
of the change, isn't that "soon" enough for you?

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/internet-
wil...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/internet-will-be-
running-on-ipv4-address-fumes-within-a-year.ars)

~~~
jerf
It's not necessarily a binary thing, which I think is one of the problems
people have when discussing this. We'll never actually _run out_ of IPv4
addresses. There's 4 billion-ish of them and they aren't disappearing into the
ether or anything. It's just another limited resource the market can deal
with, and for the right price you'll always be able to buy a block of IPv4
addresses.

Mind you, that "right price" will start going up pretty quickly. Supply is
fixed, but demand is growing pretty quickly. To some extent you can't see how
fast the demand is actually rising because it's already hidden behind large
NAT installations and such. The usual microeconomic equations for computing
this sort of thing usually have a built-in assumption that for the right price
production can be increased; when production absolutely can't be increased the
price tends to rise faster than you'd expect. I don't know that there are very
many blocks that are allocated but not actually used anymore, you'll be paying
people to drop their block and pay the price of transitioning to a NAT setup
or something, which can be quite painful.

So people watching the free-IP-block count aren't really watching the right
number. The number to watch is the _price_ of an IP block. Since I think the
price of an IP block right has discounted into it the fact that we're moving
to IPv6 and the crisis will be averted, it probably isn't as high as it would
be if we weren't expecting to move to IPv6.

And so the real problem isn't really the "running out". The real problem is
that IPv4 address as a limited, and therefore expensive, resource is just
stupid. Yes, the market could allocate it efficiently, but it's better for
everybody if it simply isn't effectively limited in the first place.

And then the consequence of that is that you end up with a lot of people
talking past each other; "well, if it isn't running out what's the problem
then?" The _problem_ is that in 2016 a startup's largest expense shouldn't be
their public IP block.

~~~
fragmede
If I want an IP block (and have a legit reason), I can get a previously
unallocated block. Soon, there are going to be no unallocated blocks. We will
have _run out_ of unallocated blocks.

(That we are able to re-allocate, and thus, resell previously allocated
blocks/addresses only means that there is a market, after all blocks have been
allocated.)

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hellweaver666
Is the bloggers location in any way relevant to the article?

~~~
mrkurt
It's relevant because Europe is the standard example of "we need ipv6".
Americans largely don't care. :)

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tomjen3
While I don't see any point any point in turning ipv6 of, I also don't think
we are going to run out of addresses anytime soon - it would be nice if we
could end natting (It would certainly solve a few of my problems), but just
like with the oil situation, the doom sayers are, as usual, way out there.

For a reference, we have been running out of oil since the early 1910.

~~~
powrtoch
The amount of oil in the world is speculated on. The number of IPv4 addresses
is numerically fixed and known.

As other commenters have noted, it's not that one day your computer will just
inexplicably fail to pull an IP address. But they are suddenly going to be
come a more precious (read:expensive) resource.

