Trouble Ahead-er

An interesting thing I did not know:

Everyone knows that TCP and IP are separate protocols that can work together. TCP has a checksum, defined in RFC 793 Section 3.1 as:

"The checksum field is the 16 bit one's complement of the one's complement sum of all 16 bit words in the header and text.

OK. IPv4 also has its own checksum, defined in RFC 791:

"Header Checksum: 16 bits, A checksum on the header only. Since some header fields change (e.g., time to live), this is recomputed and verified at each point that the internet header is processed."

Now, if you're using TCP, what you're most probably using is TCP/IP, TCP over IP, so you're computing 16 bit checksums on the TCP side, and 16 bit checksums on the IP side, so you're getting 32 bits of checksum goodness on each TCP/IP packet.

And when I say IP, I mean IPv4, a.k.a., "The Internet as We Know It". IPv6, the next big thing, doesn't use a header checksum. Let me say this again for clarity:

IPv6 doesn't use a header checksum.

The idea appears to be that fewer checksums recomputed at every hop equals faster transmission, which is technically true. I just hope folks know what they're doing, because speed is worthless if it's all just garbage. As I've seen so far, IPv6 looks like a total mess and has been designed by idiots.

I hope I'm wrong in this, but I'm probably not.