Everyone knows that IPv4 is running out; we've known for years. That's non-news. (You can tell because CNN is covering it.) The story is how people are fixing the problem.
Also, your "buy gold" quip gets an insta-flag for scaremongering.
IP v4 is never going to run out. As it gets more scarce, it will get more carefully used (more NAT, smaller subnets, more services sharing IPs) and more costly, but it's not going to RUN RUN RUN THUMP in a sharp cutoff like Y2K.
If it's not called run out, what do you call it when a company goes to their RIR with a well-justified request and is told "Sorry, that's a great request -- sure -- but we don't have a block to give you."
If that's not a sharp cutoff, I don't know what is. If you're a hosting company, what do you do when your customer growth outpaces your ability to procure IP addresses?
But the Y2K bug was a problem for the whole world at 11:59:59 on the last day of 1999, and no amount of money could buy you more time or undo the consequences - that's a sharp cutoff.
When you go to your RIR and get nothing, I accept it might be technically "run out" in some sense, but all your current customers will be OK, money will buy you someone elses spare block, adjustments to NAT and IP sharing and load balancing, sharing and tightening subnets will free up space in your existing assignments, that's not a sharp cutoff in anything like the same way.
And even if you accept it as a sharp cutoff, with Y2K you could get people in to check your code and have it ready and know you would be OK - what can you do to ready yourself for IPv6? Support routing, tunnelling and admin/billing it, yes, but when you can't get IPv4 addresses anymore you're still in almost the same position as any other company - your new customers can only have an IPv6 address ... So it's not like considering it as an IPocalypse even helps that much - no changes that you can make on your own can significantly improve your situation, without rest of world all changing as well.
So worry and panic - not much point. Imminent disaster - hardly. Some economic slowdown which you can't do anything about, maybe, as you host IPv6 services which people around the world on ISPs with no 4 to 6 service cannot access. That's about it.
Technically, IPv4 runout occurs when the RIRs have nothing to give, but realistically there will be prefixes for sale on the market at that time so we won't be "out" of addresses. If you can't afford to buy addresses at the market price then you've run out, but the world hasn't.
Agree -- IPv4 would never run out.
I even think that scarcity of IP addresses could be a good thing.
IP address can accumulate your reputation (as a non-spammer, for example). And if new IP address is not available for free -- it would make life of spammers harder.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383525