In other recent news Man has landed on the moon !

But the routing tables would have to be updated, and for reasons of software complexity and compatibility it's not a good idea to split sold /8 blocks up like that anyway. It could be done, but the investment needed versus number of addresses recovered would only work for large organisations with lots of cash. Not for signing up new home users. Same goes for the currently 'unusable' blocks.

The problem is that, even if IPv6 was widely adopted tomorrow, you still need an IPv4 address to communicate with IPv4-only servers. So there will be a point where even new IPv6-using customers will need IPv4 addresses and there won't be any.

This close to the year 2000 (as we are to the last /8 block being sold), most companies had already prepared for Y2K. IPv6 adoption at this point is in the 1-2% range of servers and a negligible amount of actual internet traffic is IPv6 due to the requirement that both ends need to support IPv6 to do so.

Y2K was a self defeating prophecy. Because everybody expected it, everybody prepared for it.

There are hundreds of workarounds for the limitations in IPV4 and IPV6 should fix the problem. We will never actually run into horrible difficulties due to the lack of IPV4 addresses (which I must say were never actually designed for the use they are currently getting) due to some rather clever people limiting the problems until IPv6 is dominant.

Edit: And yes, giving out class A networks was probably a bad idea. They didn't know that at the time however.

Could you give some specifics of the workarounds? Do you mean reuse of already-sold address space and technically unusable space? Because those have some serious compatibility and software/hardware support issues.

And they've got to be in place by the beginning of 2012, because that's when the first RIR will run out of addresses (the /8 pool being exhausted long before).

people start hording them IP addresses!

Ok. I was really very drunk when I wrote that, we could run into some pretty bad difficulties with the IPv4 depletion but workarounds have prevented us from noticing that there are more internet devices than addresses thus far. There are some workarounds (probably not hundreds), for example IP reuse and dynamic IP. Use of private networks and NAT is another workaround that is working really really well.

Which RIR is running out?

Can anyone explain to me this whole Y2K theory?  What was supposed to happen on January the 1st 2000?

Computers worldwide were supposedly going to crash and cause massive chaos because they wouldn't be able to compute the new 'year 2000' date.

You should state your own view on the topic or quote the most important thing in the text.

Content is king, posting a link is not.

Ah, we are all going to die!!! Right?