Adding two extra bits to each octet, making each octet range from a still memorable 0-1023 rather than 0-255, would result in an addressing scheme 256x larger than all of IPv4 combined. The entire internet works fine even when IPv4 was nominally exhausted. NAT and CGNAT are not sins, they're not crimes, and there's no rational reason to be as disgusted with them as IPv6 fans are. Even then, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't really a true technical problem in the first place, it was an allocation problem. There are huge /8 blocks of public IPv4 space that remain almost entirely unused to this day.

The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own".

CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios.

IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with).

"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.

I don't have your problems with ipv6, and I'm actively using it.

I don't have to rely on extra commercial entities to be able to reach my network.

I did have a problem with hosting my own shit because my ISP by default does cgnat. That cost me an hour of my life to convince a party to give what used to be normal, end to end connectivity.

Wouldn't easy and accessible self-hosting be a major privacy win if that's your primary concern? Sounds much more private to run a Minecraft and Mumble server on an old laptop in a friend group than paying a commercial entity like a hosting provider to know about it and have a back door.

Saying that IPv4 is ok because we have NAT and CGNAT is like saying that spam is not a problem because we have spam filters everywhere.

>"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale

IPv6 predates those by decades.