alt Hacker NewsEven 15 years ago IPv6 was much worse than IPv4 for most of the people. Only when the mobile operators has started to insist on it then the usage started to grow to significant numbers. Which showed the real problem with IPv6: lack of compatibility with IPv4. That was absolutely possible 30 years ago, but the designers decided that it would just complicate things.
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Dagger2 • today at 2:15 AM
No they didn't? v6 is compatible with v4 in tons of different ways, probably in almost every way that it's possible to be compatible with v4.
Admittedly, it's not compatible in the ways that _aren't_ possible. But it's highly unreasonable to blame that on the people who designed v6.
I am tired of people claiming that you can make a "new Internet protocol that is compatible with IPv4".
No, backwards compatibility is not the problem here: IPv6-only hosts can easily connect to IPv4 hosts. Just append "64:ff9b::" to an existing IPv4 address, like so: 64:ff9b::8.8.8.8. Even prior to NAT64, we have plenty of schemes like 6to4 to bridge IPv4 and IPv6.
But no IPv4 hosts can ever connect to IPv6 hosts, or IPv7, or IPvInfinite for that matter. I will refer to my previous comment on why that is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469336