Otherwise, getting to know the power of FreeBSD is awesome. Thanks for creating the blog!

I just want a way to do public-key based discovery. I'm not sure if wireguard + DHT would do though as it'd also mean that it's easy to track your PK (and maybe you through your devices/services announced with PKs).

Maybe you can announce your IP in a neat encryption scheme that adds some privacy without increasing costs too much?

Anything in your private network (even if it goes over public internet) should be encrypted and locked up anyway. Something like Wireguard or Nebula only needs a few (maybe just one) publicly accessible address. Inside the overlay network, it's easy to keep IP addresses stable.

Anything public-facing likely needs a DNS record, updatable quickly when the IP of a publicly accessible interface changes (infrequently).

What am I missing?

I do agree it should be simpler, but it is accessible to individuals today.

The market is tight, but nowhere near the point where it was 4-5 years ago. Big cloud providers already bought enormous amounts of IPv4 while many regional ISPs and colocation providers went out of business.

There is no real pressure to buy IPv4 except for brand-new companies to get their initial /24 or /23 to start. Everything else is optional.

It cannot be used commercially and should be in the ‘spirit’ of amateur radio. Unfortunately there’s also a bit of a backlog it seems (a couple of months) right now.

The whole point of BGP is to influence your routing tables. This fundamentally makes very little sense to do when you have a bunch of routers whose routing policy you don't control between you and whoever you're speaking BGP to. eBGP is just TCP and supports knobs to run over multiple hops (so up to 255), but at that point you can't really do anything with the routing information you exchange because the moment you hand the traffic off, the other party can do with it how it pleases. Also, very few people have enough public IP addresses for this, and on the Internet you obviously can't route RFC1918 space. Therefore, you need tunnels, so that you can be one hop away even if the tunneled traffic is traversing the Internet, and so that you can reach peers that let you announce whatever IP space you want.

The other thing you can do, of course, is to just do the same thing internal to your lab. You can absolutely stand up multiple ASN at home. I'd even argue that if you really want to learn BGP, this is a great way to do it, especially if you use two different platforms (say, FRR on FreeBSD peering with a cheap Mikrotik running RouterOS). That way you learn the underlying protocol and not a specific implementation, which is something that is very hard to undo in junior network engineers that have only ever been exposed to one way of doing things.

That's different from some of the goals outlined in the article, but if your goal is to learn this stuff rather than have provider-independent IP space (which even for home labs isn't very valuable to most people), doing it all yourself works fine.

Your ARIN link is broken.

It's basically $275/year to have an AS and some PA assignment with no intermediary LIR. In Europe, you have to pay €1800/year without an ASN included. Each resource is billed separately. If you go with a middleman (another LIR) you usually have to pay 200€+ (with taxes) for 2 resources (ASN and PI space)