Maybe I say something stupid, but could a "IPv4+/IPv6 ready" protocol maybe ease the transition? What I mean is the following: as IPv4 is 32bits and IPv6 is 128

Maybe I say something stupid, but could a "IPv4+/IPv6 ready" protocol maybe ease the transition? What I mean is the following: as IPv4 is 32bits and IPv6 is 128bits, you could write a subset of IPv6 in the format nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn where n is a digit and you would allow nnn to have values from 0-999 instead of 0-255 as it is today for IPv4. I will explain one nnn part, the others work the same. 0~255 means 0~255.0.0.0 256~511 means 255.0~255.0.0 512~767 means 255.255.0~255.0 768~999 means 255.255.255.0~234 You have 4 of these nnn's, so 4 x 4 bytes = ( a little less than ) 16 bytes = 128 bits, with the restriction that not all combinations can be made. But if current hardware could get patched firmware to accept/use these kind of "IPv6 ready" addresses, then the IP address could stay the same (or at least could easily be converted to a IPv6 address) if a true conversion to IPv6 only network would take place. I can imagine that this would give possibilities for a smoother transition.