Post #2430475

IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn't necessarily imply a ninth chevron fifth octet. But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet. I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system... although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.