alt Hacker NewsIt would've been even easier and lasted longer to use two bytes of hex at the start. That would've expanded the Internet to 65536x its current space.
Something like aaff:a.b.c.d
Leaving off the prefix: could just mean strictly IPv4.
Replies
cylemons • 01/03/2026
I think making the extra hex at the end is better, that way its like we are subdividing our existing networks without moving them around
In IPv6, this is spelled ::ff00:a.b.c.d
It didn’t speed up adoption and people then tried most of the other solutions people are going to suggest for IPv4+. Want the IPv4 address as the network address instead? That’s 2002:a.b.c.d/48 - many ISPs didn’t deploy that either