alt Hacker NewsMy fantasy road-not-taken for IPv4 is one where it originally used 36 bit addressing like the PDP-10. 64 billion addresses would be enough that we probably wouldn't have had the address exhaustion crisis in the first place, though routing would still get more complicated as most of the world's population (and many devices) started communicating over IP networks.
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UltraSane • yesterday at 11:08 PM
Even better if it had used 48 bit addressing like Ethernet. 32 bits is almost the worst possible option since it was big enough to seem inexhaustible initially while not actually being big enough.
36-bit is still too small for the future. We are at 30 billion connected devices. We will probably hit 64 billion in decade or two.
The most likely alternative would have been 64-bit. That's big enough that could have worked for a long time.