(Legally they're supposed to use those addresses within a year(?) of buying them, but I won't pretend that anyone would really notice whether that's the case or not.)
For general interest, this is (among other accolades) 2012 Internet Hall of Fame Inductee Geoff Huston https://www.internethalloffame.org/official-biography-geoff-...
A single static ipv4 address is a /32 slice into the ipv4 space and is considered a reasonable to size give out to a single person or even a small business that asks for it. Of course larger companies and telecom operators need larger network allocations and they have gotten them for many years in the past.
Now realize that if a /64 ipv6 network is the minimum size like a single ipv4 address then you see that the ipv6 address space has 2^32 /32 ipv6 networks. Now with ipv6 any technical person and acquire a entire ipv4 internet sized network in a continuous (globally routeable if you want) range.
And if any sized business today can expect buy a single "class c" /24 range of ipv4 it makes sense that large global compaines get a ipv6 /20 network to run their entire network on it.For example cloudflare[1] uses 6 regional /32 networks and a /29 network for all their routing needs. Imaging trying to build cloudflare with less than 32 addresses in a single /24 ipv4 allocation.
ipv6 is so large that you can just design your network without worrying about subnet size and route based on real policy or security boundaries alone. We will run out of MAC addresses before we run out of ipv6
There are enough IPv6 Addresses for 4.77 x 10^28 for every living person.
If each IPv6 address was a grain of sand…
That’s 2.39 × 10^18 of addresses per person, or roughly enough sand sized addresses to equal about 1.8 times the volume of earths ocean per person.
At sand scale all IPv6 addresses would take the volume of 12 sols.
Conversely, all the IPv4 addresses in this sand scale would slightly over fill an oil drum.
From “IPv6 Addresses: Big Numbers, Big Solutions”: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1365362
Allocating all addresses to Earth seems very shortsighted.
(Some sarcasm should be assumed.)
It doesn't really matter how you explain large-number math to people who are bad at large-number math (aka all of us) - there's always some bright-spark who misses the point.
We can give every person a million local networks, with unlimited devices on each local network. That's more accurate and also easy to think about.
Similarly, it’s more practical to think of the tree depth of a network topology. The size of the tree when full is immaterial, especially when the last 64 bits is intended to be so sparse that random address assignment is viable.
But the allocations for a single device are so large that it's not actually as large as it seems to be. Kinda like usb N only working at N-2 speeds...
We will never run out of IPv6, but I believe in my lifetime you won't be able to get new v6 allocations anymore because they will have all been handed out to the large corporations with deep pockets. Oops, no addresses left - but you can rent one from a cloud provider for a few dollars a month.
So besides the bad design ipv6 is also badly managed?