> Yes. My ISP will rent me a single IPv4 address for $10 per month.

At that price point you can get a small vm, but if you have a dedicated server you want to use on-prem, 10$/mo seems like a reasonable price.

> Or I can use DHCP, where my IPv4 address can change at their whim.

Check the dhcp.lease to make sure, I used to think that, then I looked at the dhcp lease and the IP was being reserved for up to 48 hours of disconnection. I went years without it ever being released.

Phone operators won't necessarily transmit this information to you, the true ISP operator is the DHCP server. Not only is it more knowledgeable, but DHCPd has no incentive to upsell you, just provides you with what it is configured to.

I'd even go as far as checking if you can send parameters during the dhcp lease request, maybe you can request a longer lease on the IP.

There's a right way to do things, it's not trivial to discern from the wrong way to do it, but once you see it, you notice that you lose almost nothing, it's not like the 'wrong' way is simpler, it's just 'wronger', all the way through. I guess the reason they persist is sunk-cost fallacy, the businesses and people that went with NAT then developed STUN, and then they developed ICE, and then they develop Tailscale, every time you need to invent a bigger spade to dig you out of the hole and into a deeper one.

Or you can just use IPv4. But aghast, you have to pay 10$/month (or learn DHCP)

IPv4 in China must be complicated, I would probably look into IPv6 if I were based in China, or China specific protocols, or perhaps there's some IP addresses that China has embargoed and reserved for their own? Such that inside China they resolve to china but outside China they resolve somewhere else?

On the other hand, it's not really that complicated. Cost seems to be around 10USD per month, which is what another user mentioned. And the GDP per capita of china is around 12000 USD per year, so it works out to a bit more than 1% of a salary, not sure if my maths are wrong, but from the perspective of a service provider, it still sounds like a sensible price point.

India has a lower GDP per capita, but I know that they make non profit collective efforts to massively lower prices.

Note also that a substantial part of the value and purpose of IP addresses comes from their cost. There is a PoW/PoS mechanism that associates some cost to some identity (similar to domain names), and this is part of the mechanism by which networks filter malicious traffic and defend against sybil attacks.

So 10$/month might be expensive, but it's probably the right price. If it were much cheaper than that, like 1$/month, or even 0.1$/month, abuse would rise, especially in China which, no offense, but doesn't seem to value the notions of civil law like contracts, Terms of Service or copyright dearly. At least they don't do it out of malice like Russia, it's just a difference of values, but it's probably for the better that IPv4 addresses are 10$/month, if it were 0.1$/month, I would probably just block the whole country.

>Counting the cost of creating the company so you can actually deal directly with a NIC?

No, the question was taking the price that the NIC sells the IP blocks at. Understanding that in order to get 1 IPv4 address you will be buying from a distributor at a markup, but still, with Wholesale prices at 0.6$ (LACNIC) to 2.5$ (ARIN) per IP address per year, even with a markup of 300%, we are still at filthy cheap prices (2.4$/year to 10$/year)

>Every. Single. Individual. End. User. Device. Should. Be. Addressable. Given that there are more such devices out there then there are IPv4 addresses to begin with, cost doesn't even come into it.

Oh, ok, I was writing mostly about server side IPv4 assignment. I guess your position is a much stronger stance than mine, I argue that all servers should have an IP(v4) adress, you argue that every client device should. In that sense, consider that there's a lot of users, on this website even, that insist on running hosts without a dedicated IP address. There's lower hanging fruit.