alt Hacker NewsI think 30 years should be much more than enough to realise the idiocy of proposing a non-backward-compatible standard to the general public.
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You'd think it would be long enough for people to realize that v6 is backwards compatible! Yet no, here we are, constantly dealing with people making the same damn claim that it isn't every single time a v6 story is posted.
v6 is about as backwards compatible with v4 as it's possible to be. If you have a way to make it more backwards compatible then I'd love to hear it, but when I ask this all I ever get are things that don't work, or things that v6 already does.
It's often impossible to make backwards-compatible changes to a format which wasn't designed to allow for future changes and which is designed to be as space-efficient as possible.
That doesn't mean that the limits of the old design won't hit anyway and force a switch off it.
The problem is that IPv4 has no provisions to be forward-compatible with anything with a larger address space. Thus whatever replacement you can think of will have the same problems as IPv6.
We replaced VHS with DVDs. It took 42 years before we gave up on VHS. DVDs have been around for 29 years but were mostly replaced with BDs before disappearing off the shelves in favor of streaming.
We replaced records with tapes, tapes with more tapes, and more tapes with CDs before they, too, disappeared from the shelves in favor of streaming. Except that some stalwarts have successfully resurrected vinyl.
We replaced AM with FM, and analog radio with digital radio, then streaming. We replaced broadcast analog TV with digital, then cable and satelite, then streaming. Mostly.
None of these changes were backwards compatible, and all of them were meant for the general public. They took a while. They were successful.