Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you salt and perform a one-way hash on the IP address and store that? It would alleviate a large amount of leakage issues while still giving you uniqueness counts.
IPv4 addresses are only 32 bits, which makes building rainbow tables almost trivial.
The IP is a an identifier, so unlike password salt (where the user is the identifier) you need a way to know what the salt is to hash the IP, and it needs to be consistent.
You can do a lookup table of IP-to-salt, but this either gives away your list of addresses (if only containing IPs you've seen) or is huge (entire ipv4 range), and either way doesn't prevent rainbow tables.
You can have a static salt for the entire site, but again this is not really helping much against rainbow tables (beyond requiring recalculating the table, once).
Is there a mitigation I'm not thinking of?