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Originally Posted by ken0042
I'm tempted to save a copy of that Google page where they talk about "to offer the Internet virtually infinite room to grow." Because in 20 years we could be looking at some other protocol due to us running out.
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It's fun to make predictions like that, but I have to say no:
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How big is that? Well, several web sites say there are 1.33 x 10^50 atoms in the earth. That’s way bigger than 2^120. But to make it come closer, I computed the number of atoms on the surface of the earth. That turns out to be 1.26 x 10^34 atoms. 2^120 is 1.33 x 10^36, which is still bigger by 105 times.
So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths. It isn’t remotely likely that we’ll run out of IPV6 addresses at any time in the future
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IPv6 will obsolete itself by virtue of progress, not capacity. And even then, that is debatable because it will remain a consistent, historically entrenched, and backwards compatible way of granting devices unique addresses. Basically, when they decided on the new address size, they made damn sure they would never, ever run out this time.