4 ms·

Are you describing something different from NAT?

• digitalsushi 7y ago
  Yes, but I didn't imagine it very deeply; NAT is rather like a PBX, which rather necessarily provides only a subset of mappings to the Internet. (I suppose it is a math exercise what the perfect NAT would be, if the Internet were exactly two NATted networks facing each other). When I said invent, I was supposing we do invent one little extra bit to IPv4, wherein we default to this IPv4 Internet, but we could somehow specify another "universe" and simply have another entire IPv4 network, ad nauseum. Some proprietary routing topography would presumably exist as an inner layer, providing decades of new complexities, masking the implementation for naive ipv4 stacks that couldn't be updated. Those, could continue to exist unawares and perhaps very disjoint between "universes". Anyways, I am not an Internet architect, and this idea is entirely foolhardy since we have a perfectly good IPv6 universe to move into, one that barely has unpacked the moving boxes from the previous. I suppose all I meant, is that we might invest some more energy in IPv4 before we're really done with it.