I appreciate this. IPv8 is a terrible, terrible idea, and it’s good to see someone actually built it out to prove the depths of its terribleness. Well done.
Question for someone who knows more about this stuff than I do: Why don't the problems in the "economic collapse" section also apply to IPv6? Or do they, and we've only been saved by lack of adoption?
For one thing, RIRs are not businesses. If they have less work to do they can have less staff. Worst case they could receive government funding like in the old days.
Thanks for testing,
in year 2026, still IPv6 is not fully well utilized homes, corporates especially it is worse at clouds (AWS, GCP) if you not limit north to south, they are not good for east-to-west compared to telco providers.
For example, GCP uses IP forwarding for IPv6 real IP address is not allocated at machine. At some of the components which is EKS is not support every case at IPv6.
So IPv8 can be available around year 2300 I guess :) (i have not inspected v8 RFC yet)
Because it wasn’t implemented transparently at the OS. I can’t plug in to my ip6 only network and reach an ip4 address because end user OSes don’t implement clat transparently, even today in 2026, let alone 20 years ago.
I think those were release years. More like how we went from Windows 8 to 10.
(I understand that the real reason here is either a) OSX went to version 10, so don't want to be behind, or b) many systems would pattern match on windows version 9*" so Windows 9 would be treated as 95/98.)
There is no "IPv8". Any crackpot can submit an internet-draft to the IETF, and this person happened to call theirs IPv8. If the submitter actually read the draft rather than feeding it to the slop cannon, they would have realized it is also a LLM hallucination that someone uploaded to IETF.
I am fairly sure the authors do understand this (see: "Most network engineers would laugh this off as an April Fools RFC written by an enterprise architect on buzzword overdrive."). But since the proposal got a lot of attention, responding to it is a public service. And delegating this to an LLM arguably provides an accurate signal as to how much human attention the original proposal deserved :-P
In fairness, they exist by virtue of having working implementations that (at least a few) people actually use, not by virtue of being an Internet-Draft.
A few weeks ago, the "Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8)" Internet-Draft (draft-thain-ipv8-02) caught our eye. The draft proposes replacing IPv4/IPv6 with a 64-bit hierarchical structure (ASN.Host), giving every 32-bit ASN holder 4.3 billion host addresses and consolidating DHCP, DNS, NTP, Syslog, OAuth, and WHOIS into a unified "Zone Server".
Instead of just debating the theoretical viability on mailing lists, our team at goonhost.rocks decided to implement the entire specification from scratch to see what happens when you deploy it across a distributed multi-AS network.
We set up a 10-node QEMU multi-AS testbed across 4 Autonomous Systems, pushed 112,000+ active routes into the kernel FIB, and ran continuous traffic generation.
While it works smoothly in an isolated lab, our report highlights several fundamental real-world failure modes:
1. PMTU & Silent MSS Blackholing (28-byte IP header breaks 1500-byte MTU paths without 1452-byte MSS clamping).
2. Asymmetric uRPF / BCP 38 drops on multi-homed ASNs.
3. Legacy DC switch ASIC/TCAM incompatibility (EtherType 0x88B8 punts to CPU exception path).
4. Monolithic Zone Server DDoS blast radius.
5. Systemic economic crises: RIR funding model collapse (90% revenue drop) and global BGP DFZ table explosion (3M–5M+ routes).
Feel free to sign up and deploy a VM — we are a very real VPS host!
Unlike boring corporate providers, we just actually have a sense of humor (or more accurately, the developer has overdosed on TikToks and brainrot reels).
Satirical branding doesn't mean the bare-metal servers or the kernel code aren't real.
It’s true that satire is not always bad. But I dislike that they don’t make it obvious that this article is satire. It wastes people’s time who actually take it seriously (as we can see by the other HN comments). Or if it’s serious, then why is it on a satire site? They need to pick a lane and be clear about it.
I appreciate this. IPv8 is a terrible, terrible idea, and it’s good to see someone actually built it out to prove the depths of its terribleness. Well done.
Question for someone who knows more about this stuff than I do: Why don't the problems in the "economic collapse" section also apply to IPv6? Or do they, and we've only been saved by lack of adoption?
For one thing, RIRs are not businesses. If they have less work to do they can have less staff. Worst case they could receive government funding like in the old days.
Thanks for testing, in year 2026, still IPv6 is not fully well utilized homes, corporates especially it is worse at clouds (AWS, GCP) if you not limit north to south, they are not good for east-to-west compared to telco providers. For example, GCP uses IP forwarding for IPv6 real IP address is not allocated at machine. At some of the components which is EKS is not support every case at IPv6.
So IPv8 can be available around year 2300 I guess :) (i have not inspected v8 RFC yet)
IPv8 is just a reactionary response to IPv6 not being "IPv4 with larger addresses" like people who know IPv4 well would prefer.
There would be no reason to adopt it if IPv6 were adopted.
Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted. For decades.
Because it wasn’t implemented transparently at the OS. I can’t plug in to my ip6 only network and reach an ip4 address because end user OSes don’t implement clat transparently, even today in 2026, let alone 20 years ago.
> Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted.
news to literally anyone on a mobile internet connection (which is most internet connections!)
Did you implement it, or did Claude implement it?
isn't any ipv6+ supposed to use any string address and no DNS is required at all? :D
Where is IPv7?
It's like how we skipped from Windows 95 to Windows 98
I think those were release years. More like how we went from Windows 8 to 10.
(I understand that the real reason here is either a) OSX went to version 10, so don't want to be behind, or b) many systems would pattern match on windows version 9*" so Windows 9 would be treated as 95/98.)
I have that RFC on my iPhone 9
There is no "IPv8". Any crackpot can submit an internet-draft to the IETF, and this person happened to call theirs IPv8. If the submitter actually read the draft rather than feeding it to the slop cannon, they would have realized it is also a LLM hallucination that someone uploaded to IETF.
I am fairly sure the authors do understand this (see: "Most network engineers would laugh this off as an April Fools RFC written by an enterprise architect on buzzword overdrive."). But since the proposal got a lot of attention, responding to it is a public service. And delegating this to an LLM arguably provides an accurate signal as to how much human attention the original proposal deserved :-P
Worse, there is an IPv8, from 1994, the obsolete P internet protocol (PIP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IP_version_numbers
OpenPGP key servers are an internet draft, if memory serves. I guess they don't exist either.
In fairness, they exist by virtue of having working implementations that (at least a few) people actually use, not by virtue of being an Internet-Draft.
It is not an individual I-D, but has been adopted by a working group, and has a chance of actually being published as a RFC.
Hey HN,
A few weeks ago, the "Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8)" Internet-Draft (draft-thain-ipv8-02) caught our eye. The draft proposes replacing IPv4/IPv6 with a 64-bit hierarchical structure (ASN.Host), giving every 32-bit ASN holder 4.3 billion host addresses and consolidating DHCP, DNS, NTP, Syslog, OAuth, and WHOIS into a unified "Zone Server".
Instead of just debating the theoretical viability on mailing lists, our team at goonhost.rocks decided to implement the entire specification from scratch to see what happens when you deploy it across a distributed multi-AS network.
What we built: - Linux Kernel 6.6: Native AF_INET8 (family 46) socket layer, 28-byte packet routing, and sysctl boundary filters. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/linux - Musl Libc: sockaddr_in8, inet_pton8, getaddrinfo() resolver support. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/musl - iproute2: Native `ip -8 route` and `ip -8 addr` CLI tooling. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/iproute2 - FRRouting: BGP8 daemon with Multi-Protocol Extensions (AFI/SAFI). https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/frrouting - IPv8 Zone Server (Go): 10-protocol platform (DHCP8, DNS8 TYPE_A8 88, SNTP, NetLog8, OAuth8, WHOIS8, XLATE8). https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/zoneserve... - Nginx & cURL: Patched for 64-bit IPv8 HTTP traffic. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/nginx https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/curl
We set up a 10-node QEMU multi-AS testbed across 4 Autonomous Systems, pushed 112,000+ active routes into the kernel FIB, and ran continuous traffic generation.
While it works smoothly in an isolated lab, our report highlights several fundamental real-world failure modes: 1. PMTU & Silent MSS Blackholing (28-byte IP header breaks 1500-byte MTU paths without 1452-byte MSS clamping). 2. Asymmetric uRPF / BCP 38 drops on multi-homed ASNs. 3. Legacy DC switch ASIC/TCAM incompatibility (EtherType 0x88B8 punts to CPU exception path). 4. Monolithic Zone Server DDoS blast radius. 5. Systemic economic crises: RIR funding model collapse (90% revenue drop) and global BGP DFZ table explosion (3M–5M+ routes).
Full research report: https://cdnnn.goonhost.rocks/IPV8_RESEARCH_REPORT.md
Your Markdown-format research report is full of mojibake, you might want to fix that.
Fixed the Content-Type header on R2 CDN, the UTF-8 box-drawing diagrams should render cleanly now. Thanks for pointing it out!
Seems to be a 404 now.
The whole site appears to be satire, based on the homepage. I think we can ignore this article of theirs as well.
Feel free to sign up and deploy a VM — we are a very real VPS host!
Unlike boring corporate providers, we just actually have a sense of humor (or more accurately, the developer has overdosed on TikToks and brainrot reels).
Satirical branding doesn't mean the bare-metal servers or the kernel code aren't real.
What’s wrong with satire sites? If The Onion put in the work to try this, I’d still be interested in hearing about it.
It’s true that satire is not always bad. But I dislike that they don’t make it obvious that this article is satire. It wastes people’s time who actually take it seriously (as we can see by the other HN comments). Or if it’s serious, then why is it on a satire site? They need to pick a lane and be clear about it.
It wasn't clear to me that this was a satire article. It seemed like a reasonably serious experiment with a bad idea.