[ephaeton]

having less addresses than humans is a feature that gets broken by IPv6. IMO, there ought to be less globally valid IPv4 addresses (say, a kilo less or so, maybe even a mega. We probably could even do with a giga less if you're willing to do continent/major compass routing first).

IPv6 is a bit of a surveillance backbone. First you need an ID space that is big enough to give everybody a (or many) unique tags. The rest follows. If identity clashes are too costly, the identifier ceases being a useful tracking tool. If your network is based on an ID space that can satisfy your tracking needs already, how nice is that?

In the past thirty years, I have not encountered a use-case where I thought, Oh, I wish I had one (or a million, billion, or whatever) IPv6 addresses available here! But then again, I haven't developed software for bad actors.

[simoncion]

Most of your comment is pretty incoherent, but:

> In the past thirty years, I have not encountered a use-case where...

For me, the two things IPv6 does that I care about are

1) I get at least one globally-routable IP address for every machine on my LAN that I wish to have one.

2) I get multiple globally-routable subnets so that I can have networks on my LAN that are isolated from all other LAN networks, but are still able to have globally-routable addresses.

To make #2 work, you do need networking gear that's slightly better than bottom-of-the-barrel so that you can set up VLANs. If network gear vendors cared, they could pretty easily make those sorts of features standard in even bottom-of-the-barrel gear, but they do not, so they are not.

[Dagger2]

Except not really. You can't assign v6 addresses to people, because IPs are picked ephemerally by devices based on the IP range of the network they're attached to.

You need a separate protocol (like HIP or LISP) on top to map the identifier to its current network location, and at that point you're no longer limited by the size of the underlying address space.