Yeah but that ridiculous overdimensioning is something I object to. There's more IPs than is needed to give each grain of sand on this planet its whole IPv4-sized internet. That's just overkill.
And the problem seems to be solving itself as the world is turning its back on globalism. China and North Korea already have separated themselves. Iran too. China still uses the same address space but it's not like there's open connectivity with the rest of the world. We'll probably cut off Russia at some point completely as part of some sanction (they've been preparing for that for years), and Europe will break with America if things continue. We'll just have interoperability at a few controlled border points then, like China already does with its great firewall. It'll be easy to do some address translation then.
Ps that's not something I'm necessarily happy about but I do see this trend emerging of every region trying to wall itself off.
> Yeah but that ridiculous overdimensioning is something I object to. There's more IPs than is needed to give each grain of sand on this planet its whole IPv4-sized internet. That's just overkill.
People also thought that 4 byte wide IPv4 Adresses would be large enough. It's really hard to estimate how much you will need. And because numbers are effectively a free resource, it is better to overestimate.
IPv6 also gives you shortcuts to write addresses. You can abbreviate the longest run of zeroes with `::` and leading zeroes within a hextet can be omitted. This makes IPv6 address notation elastic.