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So you wanna buy a used IP address block?
- jedberg 7y agoMy first thought when I read this was, "Why would you sell a /24, it's so valuable!". This was after reading that the whole thing is worth maybe $6,000. Which in the grand scheme of internet things, isn't that much. But I guess they just aren't as valuable as I thought. Or the price is coming down now that ipv6 is viable. I wonder what the peak per ip price was.
- CKN23-ARIN 7y agoI bought a /24 3 years ago (from the same broker as OP) for about $3500. The price is still increasing.
- jedberg 7y agoIf $6,000 really is the peak then I've been severely overstating the value of an IPv4 address for a long time. :)
- milesvp 7y agoI honestly thought they were worth more than that as well. I've been surprised by the ability to lease a static IP from my ISP for $5/mo for years. I just assumed that they had a surplus, and that was simply the current market clearing price on a surplus they didn't want to outright sell. Still, if you want to talk about deflationary value store, you could probably do worse than buying IPV4 addresses... :)
- abiogenesis 7y agoIf you come to think of it, $5/mo is an outrageous price. You can rent an Amazon LightSail VPS for $3.5/mo, which comes with a static IP address.
- meritt 7y agohttps://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Elastic_IP_Addresses https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Elastic_IP_Add... Pricing is about the same and it's guaranteed to you, not to a instance that may get shut down
- wise_young_man 7y agoThey are actually free per that link. > You can have one Elastic IP (EIP) address associated with a running instance at no charge.
- dx034 7y agoHetzner Cloud rents out static IPs to use with any instance for €1 per month. Less than a third of AWS but obviously not very useful if you don't use Hetzner Cloud otherwise.
- nodesocket 7y agoMentioned in the post, he had a class C, which is 254 addresses. At $23 an address yes only $5,842.
- jlgaddis 7y ago> 254 addresses. 2 ^ (32 - 24) == 256
- dlgeek 7y agoThere are 2 reserved addresses in a /24 that can't be used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Addresses_ending_in_0_or_255 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Addresses_ending_in_0_or_...
- asdfaoeu 7y agoWhile that's true you still pay for them and there are some circumstances where they would be used.
- oarsinsync 7y agoThose addresses are reserved if you subnet the /24 as a /24. You can use them if you use the IPs either as /32s or /31s. Some platforms may choke on this. I have no issues personally with .0 and .255 used on my network as routable host addresses.
- iso1210 7y agoOr indeed go larger. In the middle of a /23 or /22 pop your client IP on x.x.x.0 and gateway on x.x.x.255 and see some poor tools cry.
- jlgaddis 7y agoI'm a network engineer. IPs ending in .0 and .255 CAN be used and quite commonly are. (I appreciate the downvotes from the clueless who don't know this, however.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gerdesj 7y agoI have six internet connections at work. 4 x /29 + 2 x /28 and a /26 on top of one of the others. I also have six IPv6 allocations. Anyway, there is absolutely no real value in IPv4. You should always be able to find a small chunk somewhere. A proxy will work wonders with one IP. Lack of imagination, or expertise will make IPv4 very expensive when it becomes scarce but unlike a diamond ...
- Nextgrid 7y agoIPv4s are absolutely needed if you're an ISP/hosting provider or if you run something else than HTTP where there's no concept of "Host" header and it's assumed that 1 IP/port == one instance of the server.
- words3425434 7y agoI really wish HTTP and other protocols embraced SRV records.
- teddyh 7y agoHope is on the horizon: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-httpssvc-01 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-httpssvc-0...
- oarsinsync 7y agoI think your wish is that client applications (like browsers, and other client applications) embraced SRV records. I do not believe the protocol itself cares about your DNS lookup.
- CKN23-ARIN 7y agoIf you want to be multihomed, you need at least a /24 for your routes to be widely propagated. You can't simply announce a single /32 to multiple upstreams.
- 4cao 7y agoFrom the article: (1) Rent for $0.20-1.20/mo - or - (2) Sell for $20-24 Sell/rent ratio is 17-120 months. These numbers seem very different than for real estate. It's as if the cost to rent a $1M property could be as high as $60k/mo. Not really sure what to think of it, perhaps the comparison is too simplistic.
- CKN23-ARIN 7y agoMy impression is that many of the entities that rent IPs are shady VPN providers, spammers, and the like -- the reputational damage that the IPs will suffer during the lease term is priced in. The blocks that sell for $20-24/IP are relatively "clean" in comparison.
- xvedejas 7y agoI think this implies that IP addresses are expected to be a worse investment than property? Landlords would probably be more willing to sell their land if it didn't appreciate. Conversely higher rents would be needed in order to justify holding land that depreciates. The other possibility I can this of is that renting the block might have greater liabilities compared to outright selling it.
- egdod 7y agoRight. Most of their value is in the short-mid term. At some point everybody will be using IPv6 and these old addresses won’t matter much.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoHa, been hearing that exact idea since the 90s when I got on the net. ip4 will become increasingly valuable until the day it goes to almost 0. This discussion makes me want to invest in some.
- nicoburns 7y agoReal-estate prices partly reflect wealth-inequality. The rich are buying property as investment (driving up sale prices for everyone), but it is primarily ordinary people renting, and this rent prices are much more demand-constrained.
- martinald 7y agoInteresting. My ISP has been obviously buying new (used) blocks and it is a total nightmare. They bought a block which must have been used in China in some way a year of so ago. Suddenly every site thinks you are in China, prices start coming up in CNY and various georestictions apply. Luckily you can power cycle the router and get a new IP quickly. It's interesting as I imagine a lot of people (me included until I hit this) did not put updating GeoIP databases high on their priority lists, but it is a total pain when you're on the other side of it.
- icedchai 7y agoI have a /24 (aka class C block) I registered back in the 90's. I currently have it routed over my business internet connection. It predates ARIN, and is considered a "legacy" block and requires no fees. I consider it personal asset and not worth selling.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoConsider that someone pulled a gun and tried to murder someone over 12,000 (a famous domain)
- t0astbread 7y agoThe only solution is to build a castle where you hoard crude oil and IPv4 addresses NOW.
- therockspush 7y agoIs this common? Might be a bit slow here but this sounds like hoarding.
- big_chungus 7y agoI can only wish that I had this, but if I did, I'd absolutely keep it. I'd love to give every device on a home network a publicly-routable address. No more port forwarding, no more NAT garbage. On the other hand, I know a guy who got a /24 way back when; I think he just gave it back at some point, though not 100% sure.
- Taniwha 7y agoA little history: I got an /24 in the early 90s, it was how you got on the internet back then, you sent an email to a well known email address and they sent you back a class C, no money changed hands, you couldn't get anything smaller. Also almost no one had firewalls, your subnet was open to the world. Last month I got an out of the blue offer for the class C I registered for a startup I worked for about the same time ~3k I'm still the technical contact, the company is long gone, a drawer in a filing cabinet in a lawyer's repository somewhere, it's probably the company's largest asset now
- Danieru 7y agoSounds interesting, anyone investing using IP blocks? Seems like it would be an weird non-correlated asset with maybe some tax advantages? How would depreciation work for IP blocks?
- wmf 7y agoThe hippie powers that be consider IP speculation to be immoral hoarding and try to prevent it. Somewhere I saw projections that prices will rise for the next few years then start to fall (but I also saw projections of BTC going to $100K so YMMV).
- propter_hoc 7y agoWhy would you think it would be non-correlated? I'd expect its value to rise and fall quite tightly with the tech economy.
- _eht 7y agoI'm about to ask my accountant if I can use them as a 401k contribution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- paulgerhardt 7y agoWhat are the practical differences in registering a block with ARIN vs APNIC vs RIPE? If one buys a legacy block does one have to transfer it to ARIN?
- toast0 7y agoDifferent registries have different policies about where the registrants are located. It's least complicated to manage blocks that are in the registry appropriate for your entity's location. That said, I thought all of the legacy blocks were ARIN blocks, since they actually predate ARIN and the regional registies; but ARIN took responsibility for managing them. (I could easily br wrong)
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoIf they had gotten a Class B block instead, it would be worth a cool $1.3 million at the same price point. Anybody got a figure for how much a Class A would cost these days in the unlikely event of one being up for sale? The straight-line-extrapolation $300M seems a bit high.
- wmf 7y agoAmazon bought 44.192.0.0/10 for "over $50M" so a /8 would be worth over $200M.
- dx034 7y agoAny reason Amazon would pay more for larger blocks instead of soaking up many small blocks? Shouldn't VPS providers care less about having fragmented blocks?
- manquer 7y agoLot more overhead for their teams to find and buy as /10 then lots of /20 . Also they publish ranges for whitelisting etc easier with fewer ranges for customers
- iso1210 7y agoIf a /24 is $6k, or $23 an address, spending $50m on a /10 is half that, bargain.
- dkroy 7y agoIs there any ongoing cost to staying registered with ARIN or any other registry if you own a block like this?
- CKN23-ARIN 7y agoARIN registration fees start at $250/yr for a /24. https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#service-categories-and-fees-1 https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#service-ca...
- myrmi 7y agoIs it possible for an individual to purchase a IPv6 block?
- kemotep 7y agoYes it appears so. But there seems to be a few requirements [0]. Also bear in mind a /64 is more than 18 quintillion addresses so it might be a bit more expensive. And it appears they only offer /48's to individual businesses if they meet the criteria but that is still billions of IPs. [0]:https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/ https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/
- garaetjjte 7y ago/64 is just normal allocation that every home connection should get. (/48 in this notation is bigger) Given these amounts of addresses subnetting philosophy is quite different from IPv4.
- kemotep 7y agoI completely forgot about that difference with IPV6 and IPV4. You are right. There are still many thousands if not millions of addresses available to those who want them. And compared to IPV4 everyone on the planet could have a /64. Here is a decently comprehensive serverfault post[0] on the subject of IPV6 subnetting. [0]:https://serverfault.com/questions/426183/how-does-ipv6-subnetting-work-and-how-does-it-differ-from-ipv4-subnetting https://serverfault.com/questions/426183/how-does-ipv6-subne...
- billpg 7y agoPlease jealously hoard your IPv4 blocks to make migration to IPv6 more attractive.
- Ayesh 7y agoBig corps have been doing this since the begining. Several years later, we still use NAT/SNI instead of properly supporting IPv6.
- hnarn 7y agoI heard somewhere that some developing countries as basically ipv6 only since there is no reasonable/economical way for them to get ipv4 connectivity, so maybe the problem will take care of itself as more and more people in the world come online. People have money and as long as it makes economical sense to serve more people, ipv6 will win in the end.