[ih] IPv8...

[Michael Grant]

First, apologies if I have missed something in this discussion.  One 
thing I never understood was why there never was or could not be in the 
near future a sort of flag day that ipv4 became deprecated and you 
continue to use it at your own peril as it slowly became less connected 
and the default was a fully connected and working ipv6 internet from 
some day forward?

I know the history of NAT coming along and basically putting a band-aid 
on the address exhaustion issue more or less indefinitely.    But was 
there some underlying technical reason ipv6 was not ready or never going 
to be ready for prime time?

Or was this whole thing purely a political or idealogical issue that 
some people or organizations would not put aside?

I have put together many many "small" networks in my day for things like 
businesses, offices, homes, and small ISPs but never worked at the core 
router level.  As of today, ipv6 seems to work fine, except not as many 
hosts use it as ipv4.  I have it configured in my own stuff and have 
been dual stacking for ages and honestly aside from the long addresses 
which took a bit getting used to, it seems to work just fine.  I like 
the hexadecimal addresses.  I like the fact that I don't need to use NAT 
with it.  Honestly I like ipv6.

dhcp6 vs slaac, it's a local choice in my opinion.  I like the dhcpv6 
prefix delegation stuff where you request a prefix versus a single 
address for a network when it connects, that's pretty cool.  It feels 
like dhcp6 is the choice when you connect to a provider like for your 
home or office and slaac for your internal devices.

I saw someone mention they didn't like the mac address inside the ipv6 
address that slaac uses by default because this isn't usable with dual 
homing.  I am not convinced this is an issue.  First, it's just a unique 
set of bits to make up an address that has a high chance of being 
unique, if it turns out not to be unique, i think you add 1 until it is. 
  Second, you are not supposed to convert that back to a mac address at 
any point.  The mere fact that it looks like a mac address seems to 
scare some people I think.

I read through this ipv8 page and frankly I am aghast.  This seems to 
solve no problem.  I thought it was an April 1st joke to be honest.  To 
the point of a 64bit address space vs 128bits, it does not change the 
number of networks and hosts we have or will ever have on the planet or 
elsewhere, your routing table is still large.

Anyway, in the interest of the name of this list, is there some succinct 
summary of why we never deprecated ipv4 and why it will never happen?