Article

The Legacy Address Tax: An Infrastructure Economics Report

This is a report about two servers, one partially defeated absence, and what the pricing of a 45-year-old address format reveals about the internet's relationship with its own history. All figures are live billing values from our provider, not estimates.

The verification plane

EigenSelect's commitment records — the DNS TXT records that let anyone verify a selection with a dig command — are served by two authoritative nameservers we operate ourselves: one in Amsterdam, one in Warsaw. Each is a small cloud instance: one vCPU, one gigabyte of memory, ten gigabytes of local storage. Authoritative DNS for a zone of text records is one of the lightest workloads in computing; a machine of this size is, frankly, overprovisioned.

Each instance costs €0.43 per month. Both together: €0.86. Adding the proof domain itself (€5.98 per year, flat renewal), the entire apparatus — two servers, two jurisdictions, one DNSSEC-signed domain that exists solely to answer questions about wavefunction collapses — runs at €1.36 per month.

For calibration: a single quantum execution on the processor that resolves your selection costs €0.2514. The complete verification plane costs 5.4 executions per month. It is the cheapest component of the entire service, and it is the one you can independently interrogate from any terminal on Earth. We consider both properties features.

The absence, amended

Our founding position was that neither nameserver would have an IPv4 address. The position lasted approximately one hour into production, and the manner of its defeat is worth documenting precisely, because it was defeated by the one party that can compel a nameserver to do anything: the registry that delegates to it. The .eu registry's delegation acceptance checks refused a nameserver set with no IPv4 at all. One address was therefore procured — for ns1, in Amsterdam. The checks then refused the amended set as well; the working interpretation, supported by the registry's own test tooling, is a minimum of two IPv4-reachable nameservers. Delegation is the one function a proof domain cannot decline to perform. A second address was procured, for ns2, in Warsaw. Both are held under protest.

The position itself was not an oversight. At our provider, a routable IPv4 address is a metered add-on costing €3.65 per month — per address. Set that against the €0.43 instance it would be attached to and the arithmetic becomes difficult to write down without editorializing: each address costs 8.5 times the computer it is attached to, and the two together cost 8.5 times both nameservers they front, combined — €7.30 a month, or, in the unit this company prices things in, 29 quantum executions per month, remitted for the privilege of being reachable by the internet's legacy addressing scheme. The legacy address tax is now the single largest line item in the verification plane, exceeding every other component of it put together.

The economics here are not our provider's invention. IPv4's address space — 4.3 billion addresses, allocated with mid-1980s optimism — was exhausted at the registry level years ago; RIPE NCC allocated its final /22 in November 2019 [1]. Since then, IPv4 has been a scarcity market: addresses trade at tens of dollars each on transfer markets, and cloud providers, holding finite pools, have converted the address from an assumption into a line item [2]. Meanwhile IPv6 — standardized in 1998, with 3.4 × 10³⁸ addresses [3] — is deployed to roughly half the internet's users, varying by country [4], and costs nothing precisely because nobody needs to ration it.

In other words: the old, cramped format now carries a rent, and the modern, effectively infinite one is free. Infrastructure that clings to IPv4 is paying a tax to the past. We declined to pay it — for these two machines — and the refusal did not survive contact with the registry. We are documenting both the decision and its defeat, because infrastructure decisions taken silently are indistinguishable from accidents, and so are infrastructure decisions reversed silently.

The honest consequence

The residual cost this section originally disclosed — partial reachability for IPv4-only resolvers — has been purchased out of existence, involuntarily. A resolver with no IPv6 connectivity now reaches both nameservers directly.

In practice the impact is narrow: the large public resolvers — Google, Cloudflare, Quad9 — are dual-stack, so querying through them (dig @8.8.8.8 …) reaches both nodes from anywhere, and measured IPv6 availability among end users continues to climb [4]. The Nostr commitment channel, operated by third parties, is independent of our DNS entirely. But a verification service should be precise about the edges of its own verifiability, and the edge here has moved: the verifiability is now universal, and what remains is the invoice, which we publish.

That trade-off is stated here, on the verification page, and in the technical appendix of every report we ship. Every report also carries the line item that summarizes the position:

IPv4 allocation    : 2 addresses (both under protest)
Legacy spend ratio : 8.5x the nameserver fleet they front

What this is actually about

A reasonable reader may ask why a selection service maintains opinions about address formats.

The answer is that EigenSelect's product is documented rigor, and rigor is a property of whole systems, not of chosen highlights. The same discipline that publishes a cryptographic commitment before contacting the processor, records every rejected measurement, and enumerates what our verification cannot prove, also requires us to account for why our infrastructure is shaped the way it is — including the parts where we optimized for principle over universality and the parts where the entire apparatus costs less per month than the sandwich you are perhaps eating while reading this.

Two servers. Two jurisdictions. Two legacy addresses, both compulsory, both itemized. €8.66 a month, fully disclosed. The selection costs €50; knowing exactly what you paid for is included.

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