alt Hacker NewsNot all of the skepticism is "does IPv6 work", some of it is "why should I want it as an end user who values privacy and minimal attack surface?"
From my perspective:
• CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. I'm already deliberately behind a commercial VPN exit node shared with thousands of others. Anonymity-by-crowd is the point. IPv6 giving me a globally unique, stable-ish address is a regression.
• NAT + default-deny inbound is simple, effective security. Yes, "NAT isn't a firewall", but a NAT gateway with no port forwards means unsolicited inbound packets don't reach my devices. That's a concrete property I get for free.
• IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more things to audit, understand, and misconfigure.
• I already solved "reaching my own stuff" without global addressing. Tailscale/Headscale gives me authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable.
So yes, my parents are using IPv6 to watch Netflix. They're also not thinking about their threat model. I am, and IPv4-only behind CGNAT + overlay networking serves it well.
"It just works" isn't the bar for me to adopt IPv6. "It serves my goals better than IPv4" is the bar, and IPv6 doesn't meet it. Never has, never will.
IPv6 wasn't designed as "IPv4 with more bits." It was designed as a reimagining of how networks should work: global addressability as a first-class property, stateless autoconfiguration, the assumption that endpoints should be reachable. That philosophy is baked in. For someone like me, whose threat model treats obscurity, indirection, and minimal feature surface as assets, IPv6 isn't just unnecessary, it's ideologically opposed to what I want.
Want me to adopt a new addressing scheme? Give me a new addressing scheme, don't impose an opinionated routing philosophy on me.
> Anonymity-by-crowd is the point
Only for IP based trackers. Any webpages embedding facebook/twitter/microsoft/google trackers have already deanonymised you through a variety of fingerprinting techniques. This includes if you use private browsing sessions, and even qubesOS. You get a fuzzy feeling doing the things you do (and I do these things too), but that battle is lost.
> NAT + default-deny inbound is simple, effective security … That's a concrete property I get for free
Depends on your definition of “free”. Is it cheaper to lookup just a connection state table, or is it cheaper to look up both a connection state table and a NAT table?
> IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want … More features means more things to audit, understand, and misconfigure.
100% agreed. More complexity, more attack surface, more things to go wrong.
> I already solved "reaching my own stuff" without global addressing … It's better than being globally routable.
I do something like this too. It’s more private and more secure. It adds more complexity, and it restricts my ability to access things from terminals I don’t personally own & control unless I create another exposed vector though. “Better” is subjective based on metrics being optimised for.
> IPv6 wasn't designed as "IPv4 with more bits." It was designed as a reimagining of how networks should work: global addressability as a first-class property
Apologies, but global addressability as a first-class property is exactly how the internet was designed. NAT was originally deployed as a hacky add-on to temporarily alleviate the lack of addressing space in IPv4 until a successor could resolve that.
That said, the internet of the 90s was a very different beast to the internet of today. A lot of your concerns and perspective is absolutely valid and extremely reasonable given the internet of today.
> "It serves my goals better than IPv4" is the bar, and IPv6 doesn't meet it. Never has, never will … Want me to adopt a new addressing scheme? Give me a new addressing scheme, don't impose an opinionated routing philosophy on me.
IPv6 can absolutely be configured in ways that just gives you a new addressing scheme and does away with a lot of the other complexity. You’re just very much straying off the happy path, removing complexity by introducing … other complexity.
FWIW, I’m operating my home networks much the same way you do. I’ve also been dual stacking networks since the 2000s. Things have come a long way since the original pure-dogma introduction of ipv6.