> IPv4 would have had 36-bit addresses, about 64 billion total. That would still be enough right now, and even with continuing growth in India and Africa it would probably be enough for about a decade more. [ ... ] When exhaustion does set in, it would plausibly at a time where there's not a lot of growth left in penetration, population, or devices, and mild market mechanisms instead of NATs would be the solution.

I think it's actually better to run out of IPv4 addresses before the world is covered!

The later-adopting countries that can't get IPv4 addresses will just start with IPv6 from the beginning. This gives IPv6 more momentum. In big, expensive transitions, momentum is incredibly helpful because it eliminates that "is this transition even really happening?" collective self-doubt feeling. Individual members of the herd feel like the herd as a whole is moving, so they ought to move too.

It also means that funds available for initial deployment get spent on IPv6 infrastructure, not IPv4. If you try to transition after deployment, you've got a system that mostly works already and you need to cough up more money to change it. That's a hard sell in a lot of cases.

Author here. My argument in the OP was that we maybe would never need to transition. With 36-bit addresses we'd probably get all the people and devices to fit. While there would still be early misallocation (hell, Ford and Mercedes still hold /8s) that could probably be corrected by buying/selling addresses without having to go to NATs and related. An even bigger address space might be required in some kind of buzzword bingo AI IoT VR world but 36 bits would be about enough even with the whole world online.

And nothing like FOMO of developing markets not being able to access a product to drive VPs and CEOs to care about ensuring IPv6 support works with their products.