Nothing you said is false.

But I'm old enough to remember how IPv6 was sold 25 years ago: as something inevitable to address the biggest flaw of IPv4, needed to support Internet's growth.

But more than two decades later we have witnessed that the internet is perfectly capable of working properly with IPv4, scaling up to a level that no one was imaging then.

🤷 

 yes this...! there is no reason for network addresses to be scarce, they need to be plenty available so it's not ever a worry or extra operating cost

IPv6 is always a good example for how this the differential between the US and the rest of the world goes, devs in the US (which owns by far the biggest part of the IPv4 space) tend to be "there are enough IPv4 addresses why are you complaining?" while other countries which have so much fewer IPv4 addresses/pop tend to see the point of IPv6
 

 Ok, there could be no reason for network addresses to be scarce, but they 'are' scarce, mainly because it's easier to manage a scarce space for us humans. And simpler.

The point here is that there's actually no reason to have a public address in every internet connected device!
Actually, I'd argue that it's better to not have a public address in every device.

IPv4 is pushing for decentralization of the address space! ☺️ 💪 

 i mean, have you seen the image in the OP?

we're happily using IPv6 over here, thank you 😀 

scarcity pushes to look for solutions around it, and sure the other option would have been further balkanization, e.g. carrier-grade NAT, where end-users have no publicly connectable addresses at all

but having lots of globally connectable addresses is good for a lot of things, like P2P networks ! 

 Yeah, I've seen the map, yes! 😁 

But I'm arguing that they are using IPv6... just because IPv6 is available, not because it's really needed or because there's no other option (IPv4).
People using Ethereum doesn't make it less of a shitcoin, imo. 😏

Regarding IPv6 allowing better P2P networks, sorry but I don't see any evidence about it.
I can see why technically being globally connectable is better for P2P, ofc, but I don't see that P2P networks are actually any better or more common in those countries with more IPv6 penetration.

🫂 

 there is no question, ever, if something is "needed", on a global scale, innovation is decentralized

it's very simple economically: if a normal ISP user cannot afford a publicly-connectable network address, they cannot accept incoming connections, so they can't do anything P2P, this discourages P2P

this is not a hypothetical scenario, if you think it is, you have a luxury and probably US-centric view of things 

 You are probably right about my point of view.

And I hope you are also right about IPv6 encouraging P2P.

But I still think that 25 years ago nobody though that IPv4 could be scaling so well till today. 😊 

 it's taking longer than expected, for sure....! to accomplish that, they basically forced some big owners of IPv4 address ranges to sell them, subdividing them, which freed up a lot but it's not sustainable, and it really changed IPv4 addresses into a shitcoin, i don't think scarcity is ever a feature for anything but money and status symbols

i don't think IPv6 so much encourages P2P, but it's the only scaling alternative that keeps it possible

we're not really free of that worry yet, the internet could easily become a series of hierarchical gated networks for other, political reasons, but from a freedom tech perspective a flat network is preferable