TinyFish | Echoes

Address Space Archaeology

The Workaround That Became the Foundation

By Nora Kaplan— February 16, 2026

Feature image for article: The Workaround That Became the Foundation

IPv4 addresses trade at $35-52 each in 2026. Actual commodity instruments with brokers, escrow services, standardized contracts. Organizations lease them monthly. Over 40 million transferred last year.

IPv6 has been "the future" for 25 years. The internet was supposed to outgrow its 1980s addressing scheme decades ago. Yet here we are, trading 32-bit addresses like real estate while the replacement protocol sits at 45% adoption. Something about those temporary fixes made staying put more attractive than moving forward. The workarounds kept working.

Address Space Archaeology

The Workaround That Became the Foundation

IPv4 addresses trade at $35-52 each in 2026. Actual commodity instruments with brokers, escrow services, standardized contracts. Organizations lease them monthly. Over 40 million transferred last year.

IPv6 has been "the future" for 25 years. The internet was supposed to outgrow its 1980s addressing scheme decades ago. Yet here we are, trading 32-bit addresses like real estate while the replacement protocol sits at 45% adoption. Something about those temporary fixes made staying put more attractive than moving forward. The workarounds kept working.

Nora Kaplan

Nora Kaplan, former collaboration platform product leader turned technology writer. Studied human-computer interaction and spent years designing tools for knowledge work. Now writes about AI agents, work transformation, and how enterprise software reshapes human capability at TinyFish.

Protocol Fossils

Protocol Decisions from 1987 Still Run Your Infrastructure

DNS packets were capped at 512 bytes in 1987 when lookups were simple. Now 75% of major websites exceed 738 bytes, forcing TCP fallback that fragments DNSSEC responses. The limit persists because changing it breaks middleboxes everywhere.

TCP guarantees in-order delivery. Sounds reasonable until HTTP/2 multiplexes streams over one connection and a single lost packet stalls everything. At 2% packet loss, six parallel HTTP/1.1 connections actually win. HTTP/3 had to rebuild transport entirely.

BGP assumed cooperative peers in 1989. Routers trust route announcements by default. In 2018, attackers redirected Amazon traffic and stole $150,000 in cryptocurrency. The vulnerability remains because fixing it requires coordinated global adoption that isn't happening.

Protocol Fossils

Protocol Decisions from 1987 Still Run Your Infrastructure

DNS packets were capped at 512 bytes in 1987 when lookups were simple. Now 75% of major websites exceed 738 bytes, forcing TCP fallback that fragments DNSSEC responses. The limit persists because changing it breaks middleboxes everywhere.

TCP guarantees in-order delivery. Sounds reasonable until HTTP/2 multiplexes streams over one connection and a single lost packet stalls everything. At 2% packet loss, six parallel HTTP/1.1 connections actually win. HTTP/3 had to rebuild transport entirely.

BGP assumed cooperative peers in 1989. Routers trust route announcements by default. In 2018, attackers redirected Amazon traffic and stole $150,000 in cryptocurrency. The vulnerability remains because fixing it requires coordinated global adoption that isn't happening.

TAKE NOTE

Encrypted DNS: DoT and DoH add overhead but improve page loads on lossy 4G networks because TCP retransmits faster than UDP's 5-second timeout.

Protocol ossification: Extending TCP proved impossible because middleboxes inspect segments and drop unfamiliar patterns, forcing QUIC to run over UDP instead.

BGPsec adoption: Published in 2017 to add digital signatures to route announcements, but deployment remains essentially zero despite ongoing hijacking incidents.

Resolution latency: Google's crawler measures 130ms average for responding name servers, but 4-6% of requests simply time out, pushing real-world average to 300-400ms.

Cloudflare incident: June 2024 BGP hijack by Brazilian ISP affected 300 networks across 70 countries, demonstrating how trust-based routing remains vulnerable.

The RFC Reader

An Interview with the Protocol Archaeologist Who Reads 50-Year-Old Internet Standards

The RFC Reader

An Interview with the Protocol Archaeologist Who Reads 50-Year-Old Internet Standards

Protocol Timelines

The 25-Year Overnight Success

HTTPS worked perfectly in 1995. Banks used it, e-commerce used it, everyone else ignored it for twenty years. This October, Chrome defaults three billion users to encrypted connections. The technology stayed the same. Economics and social pressure shifted. Twenty-five years from optional to mandatory. The protocol was ready from day one. The baseline took a generation to shift.

Protocol Timelines

The Workaround Trap

IPv6 launched in 1994 to solve address exhaustion. Thirty years later, adoption hovers around 45%. HTTP/2 launched in 2015 to speed up page loads. Five years later, half the web had adopted it. Same internet, same organizations, wildly different timelines. The gap shows what makes protocols stick or die quickly. Successful workarounds can trap infrastructure for decades. Backward compatibility determines whether transitions take years or generations.

Protocol Timelines

The 25-Year Overnight Success

HTTPS worked perfectly in 1995. Banks used it, e-commerce used it, everyone else ignored it for twenty years. This October, Chrome defaults three billion users to encrypted connections. The technology stayed the same. Economics and social pressure shifted. Twenty-five years from optional to mandatory. The protocol was ready from day one. The baseline took a generation to shift.

Protocol Timelines

The Workaround Trap

IPv6 launched in 1994 to solve address exhaustion. Thirty years later, adoption hovers around 45%. HTTP/2 launched in 2015 to speed up page loads. Five years later, half the web had adopted it. Same internet, same organizations, wildly different timelines. The gap shows what makes protocols stick or die quickly. Successful workarounds can trap infrastructure for decades. Backward compatibility determines whether transitions take years or generations.

Protocol Timelines

The 25-Year Overnight Success

HTTPS worked perfectly in 1995. Banks used it, e-commerce used it, everyone else ignored it for twenty years. This October, Chrome defaults three billion users to encrypted connections. The technology stayed the same. Economics and social pressure shifted. Twenty-five years from optional to mandatory. The protocol was ready from day one. The baseline took a generation to shift.

Protocol Timelines

The Workaround Trap

IPv6 launched in 1994 to solve address exhaustion. Thirty years later, adoption hovers around 45%. HTTP/2 launched in 2015 to speed up page loads. Five years later, half the web had adopted it. Same internet, same organizations, wildly different timelines. The gap shows what makes protocols stick or die quickly. Successful workarounds can trap infrastructure for decades. Backward compatibility determines whether transitions take years or generations.