32.6 bits

Tags: randomthought, networking.
By lucb1e on 2012-03-03 01:10:04 +0100

33bits.org/about
"The title refers to the fact that there are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to determine who they are."

32.6 bits, that's not a lot. My unique identifier could be N&1A+ and it would more than enough to uniquely identify me if you gave every person on the planet a code of the same length.

Did you know that IPv4, the protocol which has pretty much ran out of addresses, used 32 bits to address where the packet needs to go? So we're using almost as many IP addresses as there are people on earth.

And behind every IP address, how many people are there? Here there are 4 people behind our 1 address.

Makes me wonder how many addresses we could possibly need... If you can talk to anyone uniquely in the world with IPv4 already, what do we need more space for? Well multiple devices per person obviously, but still, it's quite a 'big' idea to be able to address any given person uniquely by "that old protocol" which everyone said to be "so limited in address space".

Cross-posted at Google+