IPv8 looked like a real plan to fix the internet, but it was one man, an AI chatbot, and a GoFundMe page
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A deep-dive investigation into IPv8, an individual IETF Internet-Draft proposing a 64-bit addressing scheme to replace both IPv4 and IPv6. The author, Jamie Thain, is a Canadian tech entrepreneur with no prior standards experience who used AI chatbots to help write the draft and launched a GoFundMe to fund an open-source testbed. The proposal bundles addressing, routing, authentication (OAuth2/JWT at layer 3), DNS, DHCP, and more into a single 'Zone Server' management plane. Networking engineers found fatal flaws: the '100% backward compatible' claim is undermined by the need for translation and encapsulation, OAuth at layer 3 breaks internet layering, ASN-tied addresses break multihoming, and the version number 8 is already reserved. Despite this, some engineers praised individual ideas like the bounded routing table and the Cost Factor metric. The piece also explores how AI tooling has lowered the barrier to filing official-looking standards documents, enabling Dunning-Kruger traps where the author can produce polished output but lacks the expertise to evaluate it.
