You might be right if IPv6 adoption stayed at 10% or so. But the current trend suggests that sooner or later someone is going to demand IPv6 support on your side.

It's how I get 60~80% IPv6 traffic on my home network. A great portion of it was because of my mom watching Youtube.

Even when you discount the services run by FAANG, for personal sites, Cloudflare and GitHub Pages (but surprisingly, not GitHub itself) support IPv6 and enable IPv6 support by default.

The lack of self awareness is appalling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47355046

This article that "begs to differ" is inventing IPv6 all over again. It just refuses to call itself so.

I quote from the top comment:

>So you have to ship new code to every 'network element' to support IPv4x. Just like with IPv6.

and

>So you have to update DNS to create new resource record types [...] Just like with IPv6.

and

>You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6.

But my comment was not directed at you, more so towards those people who looked at IPv6 very superficially (i.e. the ipV6 AddRESs iS UgLY!!1! people), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You don't mention port forwarding without mentioning about hole punching.

Because what port forwarding is for, if not to ease the establishment of direct connections?

>You don't need to establish P2P connection

If you are seriously suggesting Server-Client Is All You Need (TM), I feel we might as well stop the discussion now. VoIP essentially requires P2P, WebRTC is much better with P2P. BitTorrent etc obviously runs on P2P.

Services that provide relays (for people who can't establish P2P connection) for free, can only do so because they expect most connections to NOT go through the relay, and so they could simply stomach the costs of running one small relay.

I... uh, what? Please... learn more about hole punching before trying to engage in the topic.

Hole punching, in the context of NAT, is a technique where you establish peer-to-peer connection between hosts behind a NAT.

It does not matter which protocol you use, UDP or TCP or chuckles SCTP. If you want to establish P2P connection, you must hole punch.

The only alternative is to use relays.

>I have not, but that is not inherent to CG-NAT, is it? Any switch or other hop between you and your destination can be overloaded.

A typical hop does not need to maintain a huge dynamic state table. NAT, due to its very own temporal nature, must do so.

>destination itself can be overloaded.

Apples and oranges. Destination overload is a service problem. Hop overload is an infrastructural problem.

I will raise you the opposite point: why deprive people of their ability to have a globally addressable IP address?

>But even UDP should work through CG-NAT.

I have already told you why it is wrong to make such as assumption, haven't I?

I have heard of stories coming from China and Vietnam that some ISPs implement so-called "type 4 NAT", otherwise known as symmetric NAT or NAT with endpoint-dependent mapping.

This kind of NAT is NOT hole-punchable. And because you don't control the NAT, you are simply SOL if one day your NAT decides to switch to it. Can't even use Tailscale without significant service degradation now, ouch.

Granted, I have only heard about it in Vietnam and China, and it's not a national thing -- only some provinces seem to have symmetric NAT implemented. But I feel the need to remind you that the ISPs there were able to get away with it, because the two countries have significant IPv6 presence. [0]

>Port forwarding is nice, but everyone already knows you can hardly run a server at home (even in countries where port forwarding is standard).

You can hardly run a server at home because we have been facing address space depletion since the dot com bubble.

>I hardly understand why it warrants treatment as such a terrible awful disaster.

You haven't faced an overloaded CGNAT gateway, have you? [1]

[0]: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XD

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/1as8dvy/is_there_a_wa...

And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead.

- In the grand scheme of things, the IP address itself is of very little importance. It was given undue attention because of how IPv4 was inherently limited in address space.

- If you simply needed a way to name your machines, what are you doing not using the (m)DNS? You know, services literally with the word "Name" inside their name?

Yeah, your mama was not wrong - you indeed are a special one. Now, let's bring you to a nearby playground...

>other

Well you just handwaved away the most significant difference between NAT and native IP, obviously there won't be any major difference to discuss about anymore!

No, we can't ignore port forwarding. The key thing to realize about NAT is that someone owns the NAT. Back then, the NAT lived inside each of the home routers, so even if you have a "strict" NAT (endpoint-dependent mapping NAT, i.e. one that doesn't allow for hole-punching), you can easily bypass it by setting up a manual port forwarding entry.

With CGNAT that's no longer possible, you do not control the NAT. If your ISP decides to screw you over, you essentially do not have a choice but to get a relay, which needlessly costs you money.

---

But if you really want to know what advantages native IP has over NAT, I'd say the lack of keepalive packets (to keep a holepunched NAT entry from being removed) is a pretty nice thing.

IPv6 - still the same, but the space is large enough that any first-mover advantage is minuscule.