Why don't you want every device to have a public IP? There seems to be a perception that this is somehow insecure, but the default configuration of any router is to firewall everything. And one small bonus of the huge size of a /64 is that port scanning is not feasible, unlike in the old days when you could trivially scan a whole IPv4 /24 of a company that forgot to configure their firewall.

NAT may work fine for your setup, but it can be a huge headache for some users, especially users on CGNAT. How many years of human effort have gone towards unnecessary NAT workarounds? With IPv6, if you want a peer-to-peer connection between firewalled peers, you do a quick UDP hole punch and you're done - since everything has a unique IP, you don't even need to worry about remapping port numbers.

Your ISP shouldn't be rotating your /64, although unfortunately many do since they are still IPv4-brained when it comes to prefix assignment. Best practice is to assign a static /56 per customer, although admittedly this isn't always followed.

And if you don't need a /48... don't use it? 99.99% of home customers will just automatically use the first /64 in the block, and that's totally fine. There's a ton of address space available, there's no drawback to giving every customer a /56 or even a /48.

NAT is arguably a very broken solution.IPv4 isn't meant to be doing address translation, period. NAT creates all sorts of issues because in the end you're still pretending all communications are end to end, just with a proxy. We had to invent STUN and all sorts of hole punching techniques just to make things work decently, but they are lacking and have lots of issues we can't fix without changing IPv4. I do see why some people may like it, but it isn't a security measure and there are like a billion different ways to have better, more reliable security with IPv6. The "I don't want my devices to have public, discoverable IPs" is moot when you have literally billions of addresses assigned to you. with the /48 your ISP is supposed to assign you you may have 4 billion devices connected, each one with a set of 281 trillion unique addresses. You could randomly pick an IP per TCP/UDP connection and not exhaust them in _centuries_. The whole argument is kind of moot IMHO, we have ways to do privacy on top of IPv6 that don't require fucking up your network stack and having rendezvous servers setting that up.

We may also argue that NAT basically forces you to rely on cloud services - even doing a basic peer to peer VoIP call is a poor experience as soon as you have 2 layers of NAT. We had to move to centralised services because IPv4 made hosting your own content extremely hard, causing little interest in symmetrical DSL/fiber, leading to less interest into ensuring peer to peer connections between consumers are fast enough, which lead to the rise of cloud and so on. I truly believe that the Internet would be way different today if people could just access their computers from anywhere back in the '00s without having to know networking

> I like NAT

I'm in favor of having society overrule you. NAT is a horrible kludge and not okay. Never was.

I recently changed ISPs and have IPv6 for the first time. I mostly felt the same way, but have learned to get over it. Some things took some getting used to.

An "ip address show" is messy with so many addresses.

Those public IPs are randomized on most devices, so one is created and more static but goes mostly unused. The randomly generated IPs aren't useful inbound for long. I don't think you could brute force scan that kind of address space, and the address used to connect to the Internet will be different in a few hours.

Having a public address doesn't worry me. At home I have a firewall at the edge. It is set to block everything incoming. Hosts have firewalls too. They also block everything. Back in the day, my PC got a real public IP too.

NAT really is nice for keeping internal/external separate mentally.

I'm lucky enough my current ISP does not rotate my IPv6 range. This, ironically, means I no longer need dynamic DNS. My IPv4 address changes daily.

A residential account usually gets a /56, what are you talking about? Nowhere near a /48! (I'm just being funny here...)

There are reasons to need direct connectivity that aren't hosting a server. Voice and video calls no longer need TURN/STUN. A bunch of workarounds required for online gaming become unnecessary. Be creative.

NAT only matters in so far as you don't technically need a firewall to block incoming traffic since if it fails a NAT lookup you know to drop the traffic.

But from a security standpoint you can just do the same tracking for the same result. That is just technically a firewall at that point.

How is a public address any worse than NAT? You can always choose to not respond.

So run fc00::/7 addresses with IPv6 NAT.

That addresses all of your concerns, and you have that option.

IPv4 is not holding back home setups, nobody cares about NAT at home.

The place where it hurts is small VPSs, from AWS to mom and pop hosters, the cost of addresses is becoming significant compared to low cost VPSs.

NAT demonstrably does not work fine. We have piles of ugly hacks (STUN, etc) that exist only because NAT does. If you really want to keep NAT then nothing stops you from running it on IPv6, but the rest of us shouldn't suffer because of your network design goals.

NAT is a horrible, HORRIBLE hack that makes everything in networking much more complicated. IP networking is very elegant when everyone is using globally unique addresses and a ugly mess when Carrier NAT is used.