> “why is 64 bits not enough?” Here, why not an option? Because then you don't really have enough bits to do some nice things: 1. It would be nice for your up

> “why is 64 bits not enough?” Here, why not an option? Because then you don't really have enough bits to do some nice things: 1. It would be nice for your upstream network provider (and you) if they can delegate some network prefix and thus don't need to concern themselves with the address plan inside your subnet. That means, if there is an address collision on your prefix it's not their problem. 2. Assuming you have been delegated a network prefix, having at least 48 bits for within-subnet addressing greatly simplifies self-assigned addresses: 2.1 You can use the data link layer's address (the 48 bit MAC address for ethernet) which often has weak guarantees of uniqueness (though this isn't really advised today) 2.2 You can also randomly generate addresses or generate them by hashing things, and be reasonably confident of not colliding with another station. 2.2.1 Of course, you want to check that no other station is using the same address, but there's always the hidden node problem: How does station C cope with stations A and B both claiming address XYZ? 2.3 You can (if you want) still use DHCP to assign addresses if you want. But you don't have to. 3. It would be nice if each station was not limited to a single address. 3.1 Among other things, having multiple addresses vastly simplifies building a multi-homed network. For example, you can (today) sign up for two (or more!) ISPs that support IPv6 Prefix Delegation and have your router(s) issue Router Advertisements (RAs) for each prefix. If a link goes down, your router(s) don't need to do anything or share any state... it just works (yes, really, I've tried it!). Each of your routers, of course, only routes packets for the prefix it was delegated by its upstream. (BTW, IPv6 also has some neat RFCs for letting foreign hosts know about a prefix change, so you can even transfer existing open connections initiated from an address on prefix A through a different router with connectivity on prefix B) 3.2 For privacy, wouldn't it be nice if you could generate a new address for every external server you connect to? You can do that with the 64 bit subnet address space--remember, your ISP has no say about the address plan within your network. 4. With 128 bit addresses, IPv6 allows you to delegate a /64 to yourself from the ULA block (the IPv6 equivalent of 192.168.. or 10...). You can just randomly pick a 57 bit suffix to append to fc00::/7, and you can be pretty darn confident that nobody else will pick the same one. And you get all the same advantages of self-assigned addresses (mentioned above) within that prefix. 4.1 Having a unique* local prefix maybe doesn't sound like such a big deal until you've tried to merge two enterprise networks that both have hosts on 10..., and clients hard-coded to connect to those hosts. Finally, think about how a 64 bit global address space would be split up: We're running out of IPv4 addresses, even with* NAT (and "CGNAT", which is just regular NAT with a fancy name). Most of those endpoints are users, not servers--you need at least 30 bits to give one prefix to each household with a current internet connection. Between the expected growth of internet users and all current enterprise networks, you need well in excess of 40 bits for the prefix. So you'd realistically get no more than /48 prefix at home (16 subnet bits). That's not enough to do the cool autoconfig and privacy things I mentioned. More likely, you'd get a /56 because 256 hosts "ought to be enough for anybody" and you can't do the cool stuff anyway.