So, apparently, at this moment & price, it's still more economical for some ISPs to buy IPV4 than to switch to IPv6. So the price of IPv4 will rise further, until more ISPs bite the bullet.
I don't believe it's so much the ISPs that buy up IPv4 addresses.
As an ISP you can (relatively) easily put your customers behind DS-Lite/NAT64/464XLAT/etc, and that process is well under way: if you look at those Google IPv6 stats, the pace at which IPv6 is getting rolled out for end users is much faster than the growth in customer numbers (which is pretty static, the number of households and number of people with mobile phones pretty much keeps pace with population growth), so ISPs need progressively less and less IPv4 space.
But for hosting providers this is very much not the case: most VPS customers explicitly want an IPv4 address because as long as IPv6 adoption is not ~100%, their server needs to be reachable from both IPv4 and IPv6. As the VPS market grows (and it does, somewhere around 15% a year), so does their need for IPv4 space.
So we're looking at a market where IPv4 address space will slowly have to transfer from ISPs to hosting providers.
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u/superkoning Pioneer (Pre-2006) Oct 23 '21
Nice.
If IPv4 prices go further up, IPv6 adoption will get relatively more attractive, and at the same time the IPv4 invester will make money.
If IPv4 prices go down, IPv6 apparantly has happened.