As the title says, I would like to understand what these things are and how they are related to each other (if they are), thank you all very much in advance!
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Some groundwork first. An IP address is a series of numbers which identifies your computer on a network, so that traffic can go to the right device. IPv4 is the older, more commonly used version. It uses four numbers between 0 and 255, typically written as A.B.C.D (so for instance, 127.0.0.0 is a special IP address that refers to itself), which is 32 bits long when using binary representation.
DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and is a method to assign IP addresses (along with some other stuff) to computers. The “dynamic” part of the name is really important here, it means IP addresses will be assigned on an “as-needed” basis. For instance, if you power off your computer in between two sessions, it’s possible that the IP addresses will be different. The purpose of DHCP is to remove the need to manually determine everyone’s IP address. If you’re managing a large network of devices, it’s a pain in the butt to configure a few hundred/thousand/tens of thousands of devices.
IPv6 is an updated version of IPv4. While it introduced a number of improvements, by far the biggest is in the addresses. Remember when I mentioned how IPv4 uses 4 numbers? If you do the math, it turns out that you can have a maximum of “only” about 4.3 billion addresses. It may sound like a lot, but we’ve actually been running out of IP addresses for a decade or two. The explosion of internet connected devices, computers, and servers have used up the address space. The big thing about IPv6 is that it increases the address space from 32 bits long to 128 bits long. In other words, IPv4 had 2^32 available addresses, IPv6 has 2^128, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. There’s no chance of running out of addresses under IPv6.
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