<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>tialaramex</author><text>They don&amp;#x27;t need an &amp;quot;informal market&amp;quot; when there&amp;#x27;s a perfectly good formal market. You can sell some of your IPv4 allocation to another LIR party which needs the addresses, the only case that you can&amp;#x27;t do through the formal mechanism is speculation. You can&amp;#x27;t buy  a &amp;#x2F;16 and then sit on it hoping to sell it later when the prices are highest before a collapse. Good.&lt;p&gt;One thing you don&amp;#x27;t see enough of yet is providers charging for the IPv4 address their customers probably don&amp;#x27;t need. Those have a real cost, and economics 101 tells us if something has a cost, even a small cost, and you surface that cost to your customers, suddenly they&amp;#x27;re a lot more interested in helping avoid that cost than they were when you just ate it as part of the service. Plastic carrier bags weren&amp;#x27;t free back when grocery stories didn&amp;#x27;t charge for them -- they just absorbed the financial cost and externalised the environmental cost. Charge for the bags and suddenly customers remember they already have a bag, they don&amp;#x27;t need a bag. Same with IPv4.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jandrese</author><text>All it means is the free lunch is over and people have to start buying their IPs off of an informal market.&lt;p&gt;Theoretically we could have transitioned to IPv6 instead and avoided this hassle, but too many incumbents are dragging their feet on the whole IPv6 issue.</text></item><item><author>eb0la</author><text>ARIN (North America) and APNIC (Asia-Pacific) ran out of addresses some time ago (2015 I guess).&lt;p&gt;Game over IPv4.</text></item><item><author>amingilani</author><text>There are five regional internet registries (RIRs), and Ripe NCC is one of them. Here&amp;#x27;s a map of which services what region[0]&lt;p&gt;Does this mean we&amp;#x27;ve finally run out of new allocatable IPv4 addresses with the RIRs?&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Regional_Internet_registry#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Regional_Internet_Registries_world_map.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Regional_Internet_registry#&amp;#x2F;me...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses</title><url>https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ripe-list/2019-November/001712.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Apofis</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m seeing IPv6 popping up more and more lately, so I don&amp;#x27;t think it will be much longer.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jandrese</author><text>All it means is the free lunch is over and people have to start buying their IPs off of an informal market.&lt;p&gt;Theoretically we could have transitioned to IPv6 instead and avoided this hassle, but too many incumbents are dragging their feet on the whole IPv6 issue.</text></item><item><author>eb0la</author><text>ARIN (North America) and APNIC (Asia-Pacific) ran out of addresses some time ago (2015 I guess).&lt;p&gt;Game over IPv4.</text></item><item><author>amingilani</author><text>There are five regional internet registries (RIRs), and Ripe NCC is one of them. Here&amp;#x27;s a map of which services what region[0]&lt;p&gt;Does this mean we&amp;#x27;ve finally run out of new allocatable IPv4 addresses with the RIRs?&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Regional_Internet_registry#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Regional_Internet_Registries_world_map.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Regional_Internet_registry#&amp;#x2F;me...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses</title><url>https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ripe-list/2019-November/001712.html</url></story>