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A comment on The world in which IPv6 was a good design. Parent comment

Re:The world in which IPv6 was a good design by jrm4 on Sunday April 19, 2026 @02:36PM (#47826507)
This comment exemplifies my worst fear and reinforces my somewhat incomplete idea that IPv4 is perhaps overall safer for the world, and that "worse is better" depending on what you're optimizing for.

Roughly, it's my belief that an IPv6 world makes it easier for centralizing forces and harder for local p2p or p2p-esque ones; e.g. an IPv6 world would have likely made it easier to do bad things like "charge for individual internet user in a home."

The decentralization of "routing power" is more a good thing than bad, what you pay for in complexity you get back in "power to the people."

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Re:The world in which IPv6 was a good design by MrDOS on Sunday April 19, 2026 @03:02PM (#47826695)
> easier to do bad things like "charge for individual internet user in a home."

This idea comes up in every HN conversation about IPv6, and so I suppose this time it's my turn to point out RFC 8981[0]. tl;dr: typically, machines which receive IPv6 address assignment via SLAAC (functional equivalent of DHCP) periodically cycle their addresses. Supposed to offer pretty effective protection against host-counting.

0: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8981

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