Re: That's pretty much all it does
If your attempt to fit the internet into 48 bits requires reaching for NAT, then 48 bits is too small. And in any case switching to this 48-bit address internally would involve the same amount of work that switching to v6 internally does.
Address exhaustion is exactly what v6 was designed to solve. "Expanded Addressing Capabilities" from 32 to 128 bits is the very first thing listed in the introduction of RFC 1883. AS numbers are an entirely unrelated issue. In fact your whole second paragraph is so silly that it reads as a deliberate troll.
Excessive is good! We want the address space to be too big, because the alternative is for it to be too small. The costs of the L3 address space being too small far, far outweigh the cost of the extra 32 or so bits in v6 (bits which, I note, are also used to increase security in a few places).
NAT does not itself make your internal machines unaddressable, and even a correct configuration will not prevent access to internal machines. Firewalls prevent access to machines, not NAT. In fact, if you have inbound port forwards configured then it lowers security compared to not having it by reducing the search space for servers -- instead of searching the entire subnet, you only have to search for open ports on the router of the subnet, which makes port scanning substantially easier. In the case of v6 it reduces a port scan of an entire network from requiring exabytes of traffic down to just a few megabytes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
