Wasn't meaning to shoot down the paranoia, just having fun with / at your username, as I saw the potential for fun :) It's certainly excessive, but more layers = more efficient routing, and I'd assume they don't want to go through all this again in a mere 1000 years when we're populating 5 planets, everyone has 100+ network connected devices, and data centers have billions. And everyone tweets.
You don't understand how large 2^128 is do you? Let's quit all this handwavy crap about how that's a nice big number and look at how absurdly big it is.
The number of seconds since the universe started is 13.75 billion * 86400 * 365 = 4.3 x 10 ^ 17 seconds.
U.S Internet traffic was 18 exabytes (1 exabyte=10^18 bytes) a year, so let's just say that that we are sending 18 exabytes a second since the beginning of the universe and we are counting each byte. Yes, each set of 8 1s and 0s. How many is that?
4.3 x 10 ^17 * 18 * 10^18 = 7.74 * 10 ^36.
2^128= 3.4 + 10 ^ 38 / (7.74 * 10^36 ) =~ 43. So you could have a different ip address for every byte sent over the Internet, assuming the traffic for the whole year was sent over the course of 1 second for every second in 43 times the current age of the universe.
I understand it perfectly well, yes. I also understand that people like to buy ranges of IP addresses. This much space makes it not only easy, they can sell large ranges nearly indefinitely. Sell + indefinitely = yes, from their viewpoint.
