anyone else feel like the linux kernel release quality has come down a bit here in the 2020s? i feel like it hasn't been this bad since the mid 90s. anecdotally in the past couple years, i've experienced a data corruption bug in xfs, wonky wifi firmware/kernel regressions, graphics artifacts and hard crashes in amdgpu. my experience with mainline releases before 2020 has been that they're rock solid. i'd doubt myself before i doubted the kernel. i say all this with a deep appreciation for everyone and the work they're doing... my intuition says that the complexity of it all is reaching a tipping point that is finally overwhelming the ages old release engineering processes.
at least in the original implementation of this protocol (cjdns) there was already a tiny bit of proof of work happening in address generation. forgive me as this knowledge is over a decade old but it involved finding a curvecp private key that scalmults into a public key that (maybe whose hash?) begins with some specific number. this number is what's actually used as the ipv6 address. and that specific number is the routable ipv6 prefix.
the process would be run again and again during configuration generation until a key that fit this criteria was found. one could up the difficulty of this process considerably.. though not in a protocol backwards-compatible way.