Topic: How IPv6 will destroy bitcoins - page 2. (Read 2798 times)

ipv6 allocations aren't made according to geographical region, and even then once a block of IPs has been assigned to an ISP/hosting company/corporation/whatever, they're free to use that block anywhere they want.

There are regional "registries" that are responsible for handing out blocks within their region (there's a north american registry called ARIN, one for europe called RIPE, etc) but as long as you have some tangentially related business presence within their region you can request space from any of them. They get assigned large blocks that they break up and give to people (like us) who request them. But once they're assigned, we can use them globally and unless we choose to make it obvious where a specific address is being used, it's very hard to tell.

For example, my company has a large single ipv6 allocation, which we've subnetted into giving addresses to our customers in the US, Europe and Asia. People will make databases of where they think addresses are by bulk WHOIS requests and trying to decipher hostnames in traceroutes, but that's no different than how ipv4 works now.

Further example: ARIN was given 2001:4800:* through 2001:49FF:*, which they broke up handed out to a bunch of different companies/ISPs. You can tell that one of those blocks came originally from ARIN to some company with a connection to North America, but just because the blocks came from that space doesn't mean the end user who got assigned that address is in the US or anything.

For us (slightly altered IPs so nobody gets any funny ideas):

IPv4: We have 99.5.16.0 through 99.5.32.255 assigned to us. 99.5.17.14 might be in the US, but we might have routed 99.5.22.(anything) to our datacenter in Amsterdam.
IPv6: We have 2001:4840:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 - 2001:4840:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF. Some of those addresses might be pointed at our datacenter in the US, some in Tokyo.

You can't tell just by looking at the numbers, and if we want to make it hard to tell we could.


Also, with the P2P nature of bitcoin, you don't need to connect to every person you want to send money to. As long as you can connect to someone, who can connect to someone, who can connect to someone who can eventually get the transaction to the recipient, it still works. If you're in the US and the government compiles a mostly accurate database of all Chinese IPs and blocks them, unless EVERY OTHER COUNTRY blocks china as well, your transaction will still get to China.

Yeah, if your ISP really wanted to block your access to the Bitcoin network, they definitely wouldn't need IPv6 to do it.

IPv6 would actually help the network because no more NAT means more nodes accepting incoming connections. That's good because it means data travels faster from node to node.

It is already trivial to determine the country of an IPv4 address based on public information form IANA and the various RIRs.

Yeah, me too, well, not THAT old, but been into computers/networks/programming since I was a young teen.  I can still draw up my subnet mask tables in a jiffy on scrap paper hahaha

it is needed but I am not looking forward to it.. I'm old and used to ip4 and the addies.

EDIT : Just wanted to throw in here that I'm NOT trolling, I DON'T hate bitcoins, and I"M NOT trying to get people to stop mining!  I've been buying up hardware and mining, and I'm still mining, so don't take this post the wrong way, this is just something that popped into my head the other day...



I'm sure some of you are aware of the impending worldwide upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6 because we're simply running out of address space.  The 32-bit IP addresses we know today are close to complete exhaustion, and statistics say that we have less than year until we're out of addresses, especially with the recent boom in smartphones, of which each has it's own IP address...

Temporary solutions have been subnetting and NATing, but the address space has been stretched, far, and chopped into so many pieces that we're running out of fixes.

So, the solution is the long awaited IPv6 (128-bit), which will replace the current IPv4(32-bit) in the next few years, slowly.  How will this kill bitcoins?  Well, IPv6 will also have subnets.  The first and largest of the subnets will be the ones that divide countries and geographical locations according to the first few hexadecimal values.

Meaning, (and these aren't real numbers...) if the IPv6 address starts with 34 then the originating IP is from China, if it starts with A8 then the IP is from the USA, if it starts with 6F then it's from Germany and so on and so on.

So, this is how the governments or ISP's will kill bitcoins if they see fit.  By simply ensuring that ISP's and the like block access to the bitcoin network either outside of their subnet, or selectively block traffic to/from specific subnets.  Effectively creating a bubble around their slice of the internet.

This won't affect ONLY bitcoin, but can affect ANY internet traffic.  So it will be interesting to see what governments and ISPs do when they have their own piece of the internet which they can control.

I do know that yes, you can still use 256-bit encrypted VPN's and proxies, possibly, but to use them all the time for everyday surfing?  Yuck.

Don't mean to put a scare into anyone, because this whole change over is going to take years and years, but it's happening.  I'm already implementing IPv6<->IPv4 translating using TRT Cisco hardware at work since we're considering just getting it over with and switching our internal network to IPv6 now, just to stay ahead of the game.

But as the years pass, you'll notice more people and websites having IPv6 addresses, and IPv4 slowly disappearing...

Food for thought.  Thanks for reading!

And, woohoo! Post 69!