alt Hacker News> 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.
Well considering the 4 bytes were designed in the time of a small research network between defense and universities, it's great foresight that they made it as big as it is. It still runs most of the internet to this day.
But it's not free, after all every packet carries this burden. I know about the annotation but it also makes it very difficult to parse.