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Comment by doubled112

9 hours ago

I'm also not sure how much it helps, but a friend and I were just talking about how big the numbers get today.

My ISP provides my house a /56 allocation. There are 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 addresses. I should have enough for a couple of years, at least.

I guess you could scan it. The IPs for most devices are chosen randomly within a /64 subnet, or they're based on MAC address, but they're not sequential by any means. A /64 is still 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible IPs.

Unfortunately I think one of the problems with v6 is people are just unable to apply intuition to numbers this big. The minimum number of /64s an ISP will have is around 4 billion. They generally give subscribers a /56 which is 256 /64s. It's all simple power-of-2 arithmetic. Computer people used to get how big 2^64 is.

  • I agree. Writing out the whole number was intentional.

    How many digits is that? Woah, I can barely count the commas!