We Don't Talk About IPv5

The great IPv6 conspiracy finally exposed! After decades of network engineers forcing us to memorize hexadecimal nightmares like 2001:500:2f::f, someone's finally calling out this madness.

Remember when IP addresses were just four simple numbers? Then these networking folks decided "let's add letters and colons because clearly that's more user-friendly!" Meanwhile, NAT was sitting there the whole time, perfectly capable of solving our address shortage without making us type hieroglyphics.

The diagrams at the bottom really sell it - complex network schematics that might as well be ancient runes to most of us. Twenty years of "IPv6 is the future" and we're all still running IPv4 with NAT because, surprise, it actually works.

And yes, there's no IPv5. It was experimental, never deployed, and now exists only in networking folklore - like documentation that's actually helpful.