The idea of 32 becoming scarce was laughable.
Also the complaint about ipv6 isn't a technical one, it's a usability one. Extending it to 48 bits would have been easy enough for people - like international calling.
Those 16 bits could be in hex, as a convention, so something like "(4EA7) 8.8.4.2".
However, I've constantly heard that the 128 bit hexadecimal with colons just looks too complicated and inconvenient.
You might be brilliant and find it easy but to a lot of people ipv6 addresses look like cryptographic hashes
Also having 64-bit for the network address (and 64-bit for the device) does have certain benefits that make it easier to use than shorter addresses in practice for a single entity, since one can hierarchically model the network and do things like <my_network>:<site-id>:<vlan>. So even in absence of DNS one doesn't quite have to remember 128-bit of information for every device.
the pyramids in egypt took over a lifetime to build; a marvel of engineering, as theyve lasted thousands of years and noones had to build replacement pyramids. the problem, though, is noone in todays culture needs pyramids.
A typical ISP will get allocated a much larger allocation like a /20, which allows them to allocate a /56 for each of their customers while still having a few bits to play with. But all starting with the same <isp_network> prefix.
With IPv4 you will have many separate fragmented networks that have no numbers in common. And this will only get worse over time.
The most recent anonymous editor to the IPv6 address article on Wikipedia has address "2602:FBF6:0:0:30C6:7069:6DF0:FD24". An IPv4-like notation of that would be "9730.64502.0.0.12486.28777.28144.64804".
There are some technical advantages to doing things that way of course, but they are arguably rather outweighed by the administrative disadvantages. The protocol could have been designed so that typical layer 3 addresses were not much longer, nor harder to type or remember than IPv4 addresses are.
This is probably because the idealized world of "only network engineers" is leaky. Programmers, sysadmins, people trying to get their network printer to work, non-specialists have to interface with network addresses constantly.
Saying they shouldn't is not a description of reality. Not everyone who needs to set up or diagnose a network do so as a career path.
Almost all hardware and software has supported ipv6 for many many years. The humans using it are the ones that shut it off or disable it. Unless you address the human behavior of why that is, this problem will not be addressed.
I claim there needs to be a friendlier, casual interface that makes people's lives easier. It can be a crude kneecapped sheen so long as it addresses the needs of the general user. Then they'll use ipv6, not for ideology or virtue reasons about the commons but because it makes their lives easier
I don't really understand the use case for typing up addresses either, copy pasting is going to be more precise, and if one can't read 8 quartet of letters one shouldn't be near networking equipment either.
Heck ibans are about as complex and the general population is coping just fine
I have an IPv6 address but haven't bothered memorizing it or giving it out because it would just be more hassle.
PS: As a developer, I often read logs and go ”oh yeah, that’s just our satellite office IP”. 192.168.1.110 is the network printer, etc. There’s no hope of recognizing IPv6 addresses at a glance the same way.
There's different "rules" from IPv4, but as a developer those mostly don't matter and if your network engineer wants you pattern matching your network's machines, then you can just as easily pattern match your network's machines as with IPv4. (That said, there's privacy reasons your network engineers might not want that, security through obscurity and all that. That can be just as true in IPv4, but fewer companies have enough IPv4 address space to truly obfuscate the network patterns. Life is harder for network engineers in IPv6 not entirely because it "has to be" but because "privacy and security is 'easier' if we use a more complicated approach to IPv6 than we did with IPv4 where we would just sequentially number machines within our allotted space".)
