Of course we did run out of addresses many years ago but thanks to NATs we've kept things patched together.
The bug is not the NAT but in making the IP address so important. It is just a circuit identifier for the path between two machines. We shouldn't be using it as the application-relationship identifier as we do now with port numbers acting as a hack for simulating application relationships. Want to connect to the SMTP server on a given machine, then use IP:25. Want to connect to a different server . oops. But those IP relationships are not stable and V6 doesn't address that issue. Skype shows a far better approach with stable application identifiers though the centralized address database is far from ideal - at least it's not inside the network. Instead of spending more than a decade on V6 we should've been putting more effort into an approach of providing stable relationships between the end points themselves rather than adding more bits to the circuit number. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wes Felter Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2010 16:56 To: [email protected] Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: Predicting a black market in IPv4 addresses Whether the market is white or black, let's guess that the retail price of an IPv4 address will increase from $1/month to roughly $10/month. That isn't a lot of money, considering that you can run a fairly large service on one address using load balancers. > " ... predict that many new servers will be IPv6-exclusive, gradually > isolating IPv4-only Internet users." I predict that this will *not* happen. All public-facing services will have IPv4; it's the "clients" who will be on IPv6 + DS-Lite. It's not that bad of a scenario, since mostly everything will mostly work. (Broadband providers swear that they wouldn't take IPv4 addresses away from residential customers and sell those addresses to hosting customers, but I'll believe that when I don't see it.) Wes Felter
