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What ridiculous overdimensioning? L2 addresses are 64 bits, and L3 has to be bigger than L2 because L3 acts as an aggregation layer over L3. From staring at RFC 3194, I'd say the minimum size for L3 is about 80 bits.

v6 is 128 bits, which is the smallest power of 2 that's bigger than 80 and is only an extra 48 bits. Is that really enough to qualify for a claim of "ridiculous overdimensioning"? Especially when we really, really don't want to discover down the line that we made it too small and now need to migrate to another L3 protocol?

I get that the resulting number of IPs is big, but... so? Everything deals with the 128-bit long addresses, not the 2^128-entry long list of IPs. There's no need to care about the latter, just like there's no need to care about the number of potential RSA2048 keys or whatever.



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