If IPv4 were land

rokostik 259 points 362 comments October 29, 2026
iptrust.co · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

timvdalen

Good to see the Dutch were able to seize a lot of blocks from the sea!

oakchris1955

Either I've lost it, or there are other countries there that are bigger losers than the DRC. North Korea says it is 1069.6 times smaller, Greenland says it is 1507.8 times smaller, etc.

xacky

The fact that we have yet to fully deprecate IPv4 should be considered a great failure in the tech industry's competence.

Guillaume86

Population would make more sense.

MisterMunchkin

I still think we should just extend the length of IPv4. In my proposed system, existing addresses would become a subnet of the new set. Eg 192.168.0.1 becomes 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1 And then we dish out all the new address space. You would get the network providers to handle address conversion until software and hardware has been updated. Because all the existing addresses are reserved in the new set, it doesn’t affect them. Keeps all the nice parts of IPv4, doesn’t require everyone to switch to an entirely new system, backwards compatible with existing hardware/software. Problem solved.

cbondurant

I'd be interested to see how this compares to the same scaling procedure, but by population. Essentially seeing what the IPv4-per-capita is.

fluxsolstice

What an interesting critter the UK is in terms of its shape

tgv

The elephant in the room: I didn't check the other mammoths, but e.g. Amazon has 4.4% of all ipv4 addresses.

yoggies_bro

I like how Hawaii migrates to California and Egpyt yeets itself into the Indian ocean. Quality animation that instills confidence in accuracy!

darkwater

As an Italian, I'm astonished by Italy.

bugake

Reddit shadowbanned me multiple times for either absurd or political reasons, but my ISP used to assign dynamic IPv4 addresses, so I could easily create a new account. Then it switched to IPv6 with a static address, and now I can't create new Reddit accounts anymore.

noelperez

Interesting.

TZubiri

Hi, I’m helping a hospital in Buenos Aires that has lost their IPv4 due to their ISP moving to CGNAT, putting their on prem imaging servers offline for 7 days. (it’s ok for us though, we have a backup failover isp) Might have to do something horrible like: - setup an ipv4 tunnel, which will require hacking a VPN to allow TCP listening, and routing connections to some external proxy with a dedicated static ipv4 address - or do some modem router level nat port forwarding, and use a ddns to avoid ip changes breaking stuff. but that won’t work probably since public ip is shared will investigate the isp to see if they are truly short in ipv4 or if they are just moving clients off them in order to sell them to higher bidders and plans, which is likely since I’ve been upsold into optic fiber, static ip surcharge, sd-wan, dedicated connection so far if you have any advice or RIR contacts (or an ipv4 block to donate, invest or sell), I’d be thankful, my email is in my profile

nzeid

FWIW I get the most hilarious spam and strangest scanners from Netherlands.

andix

IPv6 got some real traction in the last decade. From around 10% adoption up to 50%. It's not dead, like many are claiming. It works fine, just keep implementing it.

inglor_cz

Now this is an interesting map. First impression: Poland stronk. Even Czechia strong. Charles IV.'s realm restored. Russia in shambles, not a very efficient conqueror of the address space. And the glory of Rome restored, with pitiful Constantinople looking at their backs from afar. Second impression: Morocco, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa as the African heavy-weights. Corresponds to what I know. Third impression: the real bosses are Taiwan and South Korea - just wow.

throw0101c

Ran across a comment a while ago on some fun "IPv6 math": On the surface of the Earth [land+water], there are 8.4 IPv4 addresses per km². Not counting the oceans, that would be 28 IPv4 addresses per km² land. IPv6 gives 10¹⁷ addresses per mm² (yes, square millimetre). In terms of volume, 10⁸ IPv6 addresses per mm³ throughout the Earth. * Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326806#unv_28331245 A second way of thinking about it: * Stars in the Milky Way: 400 Billion * Galaxies in the universe: 2 Trillion * So (4x10¹¹)x(2x10¹²) = 8x10²³ stars in the universe. * Size of IPv6 address space: 3.4x10³⁸ * Find the ratio between addresses and stars: 3.4x10³⁸ / 8x10²³ IPv6 offers about 430 trillion times more addresses than estimated stars in the universe. From Tom Coffee's presentation "An Enterprise IPv6 Address Planning Case-Study": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tnh4upTOC4

shubhamjain

India: 47M China: 358M Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay. Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers. [1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

rayiner

Meanwhile I’m here carving out a couple of /64s from the /48 block of IPv6 addresses Comcast gave me.

huijzer

Unsurprisingly, the map is very similar to the World Population Density Map: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00

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