> Future proofing it by jumping straight to 128 bits instead of 64.

It's hard to disagree with your point since 64 would definitely have been better than the 32 we have. I'm not convinced the choice of going for 128 bits posed any real challenge to adoption though.

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hinkley 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The irony that I forgot to voice is that if we had gone 64 and feeder features we’d be farther along in adoption now and probably be consuming the address space at least a fraction as fast as people feared.

By raising the barrier to entry so high we guaranteed the features would likely never be needed.

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xpltr7 an hour ago | parent [-]

They did have a proposal for 64bit...was ipv7.

	▲	p_l 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They also had IPv9 with 20 byte addresses (160 bits) though some of that was consumed for common prefix announcing "this is a TUBA address". It was even something that was already supported by some hardware and software, as it was just dropping IP and replacing it with CLNP and transporting TCP and UDP over it (I think the most complex part was adapting ICMP-based tools).