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I was just thinking this when reading the email Hetzner sent me. Would it be a good investment to buy 1000 IPv4 addresses now and sell them in a few years?

by pimeys 5y ago

dmurray 5y ago
Seems like a bad long term investment, since there's a plan for them to be worthless eventually. Economically speaking, if the market is rational, the price should tend down over time. Of course the market may not be rational (it's obviously not super liquid, either), and it's very plausible the price creeps up over time before eventually crashing, or that we never get to widespread IPv6 adoption after all. Maybe you have some insight that they are underpriced at the moment and IPv6 adoption is further away than the market thinks. But I wouldn't contemplate this as an investment unless I had some plan to collect rent for the assets to make up for the expected eventual depreciation.
wmf 5y ago
Note that this is "illegal".
tialaramex 5y ago
You can't do this. The thing that's saleable is routable IPv4 address space. That is, blocks of addresses which can just be announced somewhere by a new owner. I can't meaningfully sell say 81.2.89.126 even though that address is "mine". The RIRs still manage this namespace. Their rules only allow transfers of space to LIRs that have a justified need for the addresses, the "sale" just allows you to bump their request to the top of the queue matched against your return of those addresses. At exhaustion (where most regions are now), the queue won't move unless either some kind soul gives back some addresses or, more likely they sell those addresses to somebody not at the front of the queue. So, you can't really just buy 1000 IPv4 addresses. You would need to create an entity that needs 1000 addresses, that could buy them, and then it could use them, but then that's not really an "investment in IPv4 addresses" it's a company (ISP? Cloud provider maybe?) that you founded and provided some capital to in the form of the address space it needed.
- skybrian 5y ago
  So the question is what's the easiest way to use IP addresses that counts as "in use?" The real estate equivalent would be turning a vacant lot into a parking lot while waiting for a good offer from someone who wants to build a building.

I was just thinking this when reading the email Hetzner sent me. Would it be a good investment to buy 1000 IPv4 addresses now and sell them in a few years?

by pimeys 5y ago

I was just thinking this when reading the email Hetzner sent me. Would it be a good investment to buy 1000 IPv4 addresses now and sell them in a few years?

dmurray 5y ago

Seems like a bad long term investment, since there's a plan for them to be worthless eventually. Economically speaking, if the market is rational, the price should tend down over time. Of course the market may not be rational (it's obviously not super liquid, either), and it's very plausible the price creeps up over time before eventually crashing, or that we never get to widespread IPv6 adoption after all. Maybe you have some insight that they are underpriced at the moment and IPv6 adoption is further away than the market thinks. But I wouldn't contemplate this as an investment unless I had some plan to collect rent for the assets to make up for the expected eventual depreciation.

wmf 5y ago

Note that this is "illegal".

tialaramex 5y ago

You can't do this. The thing that's saleable is routable IPv4 address space. That is, blocks of addresses which can just be announced somewhere by a new owner. I can't meaningfully sell say 81.2.89.126 even though that address is "mine". The RIRs still manage this namespace. Their rules only allow transfers of space to LIRs that have a justified need for the addresses, the "sale" just allows you to bump their request to the top of the queue matched against your return of those addresses. At exhaustion (where most regions are now), the queue won't move unless either some kind soul gives back some addresses or, more likely they sell those addresses to somebody not at the front of the queue. So, you can't really just buy 1000 IPv4 addresses. You would need to create an entity that needs 1000 addresses, that could buy them, and then it could use them, but then that's not really an "investment in IPv4 addresses" it's a company (ISP? Cloud provider maybe?) that you founded and provided some capital to in the form of the address space it needed.

skybrian 5y ago
So the question is what's the easiest way to use IP addresses that counts as "in use?" The real estate equivalent would be turning a vacant lot into a parking lot while waiting for a good offer from someone who wants to build a building.