2^64Everybody should be convinced that, when it comes to cryptography,is actually a small number. SEND alleviates this risk by cryptographically link a public key to the entire 128 bits of the address. This is NOT overkill.
But is 2^80 big enough? Omitting the /48 prefix from the crypto would avoid the hash changing when rehoming to a different prefix.
Not really. The 16 bit subnet identifier is not very random in practice.
In many cases, the value is 0 or 1, and you get only 1 additional bit,
not 16...
-- Christian Huitema