alt Hacker NewsOk so I was looking at the market rates for ipv4, and it appears that $20 per IP is a common figure, which means that a /24 block is worth about $5000.. so, what's the catch? And how many /24 blocks does ARDC have available, really?
I'm most curious to understand why didn't bad actors gobble up all those /24 blocks already.
You're absolutely correct - it's an incredibly valuable asset.
It's a really interesting piece of internet history. The whole 44.0.0.0/8 was assigned for loose 'amateur radio use' back in the 80s. For the most part it was used for building mesh networks over RF in different locations.
Then IP addresses became quite valuable. Now, I feel that what was really going to happen is that, with no real organisation around it, and not that much use of a very valuable asset, it would have been not unthinkable for the whole lot to have been taken away [by ARIN/ICANN/whoever] and assigned for general use. Certainly easier than taking it away from the US military. So, about a third of this space was sold to AWS and the money used to fund an actual organisation with staff - but mainly to issue grants to amateur radio projects around the world.
They therefore really do have [tens of thousands - sorry I don't remember how to calculate it right now] of /24s available. Internally - they allocate it how they want, some are only used on mesh networks, some are used for infra, some only private networks, but plenty for people to announce.
When they assign it to you, they're only giving you a Letter of Authorisation, and creating a route in a routing DB saying that your ASN is allowed to announce that allocation. They can withdraw that at any time which means the routes will be ignored by others.
Having the ham radio licence requirement is a reasonably accessible, yet robust entry barrier. The catch is you can't use the addresses for commercial purposes. They have staff and volunteers pretty much full time so if they find that they just cut you off.
An interesting parallel is the ham radio frequencies themselves. I love messing around with building equipment and transmitting, but actually getting an exclusive licence for a chunk of spectrum would cost me an impractical amount.