So you wanna buy a used IP address block?

[martinald]

Interesting. My ISP has been obviously buying new (used) blocks and it is a total nightmare. They bought a block which must have been used in China in some way a year of so ago. Suddenly every site thinks you are in China, prices start coming up in CNY and various georestictions apply.

Luckily you can power cycle the router and get a new IP quickly.

It's interesting as I imagine a lot of people (me included until I hit this) did not put updating GeoIP databases high on their priority lists, but it is a total pain when you're on the other side of it.

[icedchai]

I have a /24 (aka class C block) I registered back in the 90's. I currently have it routed over my business internet connection. It predates ARIN, and is considered a "legacy" block and requires no fees. I consider it personal asset and not worth selling.

[jcims]

Not sure how widely known it is but you can now ‘bring your own IP addresses’ to AWS. They will advertise down to a /24. Icedchai’s might not pass validation with the legacy status, not sure. Details on the AWS site. (Also I’m guessing other cloud providers do this, I’m just not familiar.)

[therockspush]

Is this common? Might be a bit slow here but this sounds like hoarding.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Consider that someone pulled a gun and tried to murder someone over 12,000 (a famous domain)

[weebwoobfly]

Will you leave it to your heirs?

[dkroy]

Would all of the blocks being sold on this website be legacy blocks as well?

[jedberg]

My first thought when I read this was, "Why would you sell a /24, it's so valuable!". This was after reading that the whole thing is worth maybe $6,000. Which in the grand scheme of internet things, isn't that much.

But I guess they just aren't as valuable as I thought. Or the price is coming down now that ipv6 is viable.

I wonder what the peak per ip price was.

[CKN23-ARIN]

I bought a /24 3 years ago (from the same broker as OP) for about $3500. The price is still increasing.

[milesvp]

I honestly thought they were worth more than that as well. I've been surprised by the ability to lease a static IP from my ISP for $5/mo for years. I just assumed that they had a surplus, and that was simply the current market clearing price on a surplus they didn't want to outright sell.

Still, if you want to talk about deflationary value store, you could probably do worse than buying IPV4 addresses... :)

[nodesocket]

Mentioned in the post, he had a class C, which is 254 addresses. At $23 an address yes only $5,842.

[Taniwha]

A little history: I got an /24 in the early 90s, it was how you got on the internet back then, you sent an email to a well known email address and they sent you back a class C, no money changed hands, you couldn't get anything smaller. Also almost no one had firewalls, your subnet was open to the world.

Last month I got an out of the blue offer for the class C I registered for a startup I worked for about the same time ~3k I'm still the technical contact, the company is long gone, a drawer in a filing cabinet in a lawyer's repository somewhere, it's probably the company's largest asset now

[lostlogin]

Company IP that the lawyers didn’t screw down.

[billpg]

Please jealously hoard your IPv4 blocks to make migration to IPv6 more attractive.

[hnarn]

I heard somewhere that some developing countries as basically ipv6 only since there is no reasonable/economical way for them to get ipv4 connectivity, so maybe the problem will take care of itself as more and more people in the world come online. People have money and as long as it makes economical sense to serve more people, ipv6 will win in the end.

[Ayesh]

Big corps have been doing this since the begining. Several years later, we still use NAT/SNI instead of properly supporting IPv6.

[4cao]

From the article:

(1) Rent for $0.20-1.20/mo - or -

(2) Sell for $20-24

Sell/rent ratio is 17-120 months. These numbers seem very different than for real estate. It's as if the cost to rent a $1M property could be as high as $60k/mo. Not really sure what to think of it, perhaps the comparison is too simplistic.

[xvedejas]

I think this implies that IP addresses are expected to be a worse investment than property? Landlords would probably be more willing to sell their land if it didn't appreciate. Conversely higher rents would be needed in order to justify holding land that depreciates.

The other possibility I can this of is that renting the block might have greater liabilities compared to outright selling it.

[CKN23-ARIN]

My impression is that many of the entities that rent IPs are shady VPN providers, spammers, and the like -- the reputational damage that the IPs will suffer during the lease term is priced in. The blocks that sell for $20-24/IP are relatively "clean" in comparison.

[nicoburns]

Real-estate prices partly reflect wealth-inequality. The rich are buying property as investment (driving up sale prices for everyone), but it is primarily ordinary people renting, and this rent prices are much more demand-constrained.

[gerdesj]

I have six internet connections at work. 4 x /29 + 2 x /28 and a /26 on top of one of the others. I also have six IPv6 allocations.

Anyway, there is absolutely no real value in IPv4. You should always be able to find a small chunk somewhere. A proxy will work wonders with one IP.

Lack of imagination, or expertise will make IPv4 very expensive when it becomes scarce but unlike a diamond ...

[CKN23-ARIN]

If you want to be multihomed, you need at least a /24 for your routes to be widely propagated. You can't simply announce a single /32 to multiple upstreams.

[Nextgrid]

IPv4s are absolutely needed if you're an ISP/hosting provider or if you run something else than HTTP where there's no concept of "Host" header and it's assumed that 1 IP/port == one instance of the server.

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

If they had gotten a Class B block instead, it would be worth a cool $1.3 million at the same price point.

Anybody got a figure for how much a Class A would cost these days in the unlikely event of one being up for sale? The straight-line-extrapolation $300M seems a bit high.

[wmf]

Amazon bought 44.192.0.0/10 for "over $50M" so a /8 would be worth over $200M.

[myrmi]

Is it possible for an individual to purchase a IPv6 block?

[kemotep]

Yes it appears so. But there seems to be a few requirements [0].

Also bear in mind a /64 is more than 18 quintillion addresses so it might be a bit more expensive. And it appears they only offer /48's to individual businesses if they meet the criteria but that is still billions of IPs.

[0]:https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/

[paulgerhardt]

What are the practical differences in registering a block with ARIN vs APNIC vs RIPE? If one buys a legacy block does one have to transfer it to ARIN?

[toast0]

Different registries have different policies about where the registrants are located. It's least complicated to manage blocks that are in the registry appropriate for your entity's location.

That said, I thought all of the legacy blocks were ARIN blocks, since they actually predate ARIN and the regional registies; but ARIN took responsibility for managing them. (I could easily br wrong)

[dkroy]

Is there any ongoing cost to staying registered with ARIN or any other registry if you own a block like this?

[CKN23-ARIN]

ARIN registration fees start at $250/yr for a /24. https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#service-ca...

[Danieru]

Sounds interesting, anyone investing using IP blocks? Seems like it would be an weird non-correlated asset with maybe some tax advantages? How would depreciation work for IP blocks?

[wmf]

The hippie powers that be consider IP speculation to be immoral hoarding and try to prevent it. Somewhere I saw projections that prices will rise for the next few years then start to fall (but I also saw projections of BTC going to $100K so YMMV).

[propter_hoc]

Why would you think it would be non-correlated? I'd expect its value to rise and fall quite tightly with the tech economy.

[_eht]

I'm about to ask my accountant if I can use them as a 401k contribution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯