Does your phone only have a v6 address though? If it did, you would need some kind of proxy (6to4 [1], the most likely example) connecting to HN's IPv4 address on your behalf.

As the sibling points out, if both site and device support v6 the intermediate translation isn't required.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

That's exactly what it is. There is always a proxy, which negates part of the argument, but is a very useful tool in transitioning over the next 2 other decades at least... the way this is going.

It definitely wouldn't be 6to4; that requires a v4 address.

It'll be NAT64.

Ah you're right, 6to4's a 1:1 IPV6 to IPv4 translation.

It's a bit more than 1:1. 6to4 tunnels a /48 to every v4 address.

> Wait, if my phone is IPv6, then what does it mean that a site 'supports' v6? I can get on HN just fine.

It means that the phone doesn't have to talk through a network-translation box, which may add latency. For some things (gaming?) this may be important, while for others it may not be.

Further, the price of each IPv4 address is going up, and so having your hosts on IPv6 may allow for the lowering of your costs, which you can pass onto your customers or add to your margin.

About a year ago they were US$ 30/IPv4, and they now seem to be in the $50 range:

* https://auctions.ipv4.global

* https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

We use VPS from tilaa.com and they charge 2 Euro per extra IPv4 and for the third etc. address per server one needs to submit a technical reason for doing that that they manually review.

Websites have separate DNS records for ipv6 (AAAA record) and ipv4 (A record). Since ipv6 is not universally supported, the de facto expectation is that if website has ipv6 DNS record, it should also have an ipv4 one for the users who can't talk ipv6.

Your device's network stack first learns if your mobile ISP supports ipv6 or not, and based on that and DNS reply decides how to connect to a given website.

You establish a TCP session with the IPv6 address of that site instead of its IPv4 one by way of getting its AAAA record and your phone having dual-stack networking enabled.

(Most US carriers have IPv6 enabled and issue IPv6 addresses to their phones.)