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> There are obvious difficulties here regarding how we'd handle certain fields (e.g. how do I calculate your shipping if I don't know your exact zip code)

Forget calculating shipping; how do you ship me my product at all without me giving you my address?

(A quick napkin sketch would be that I wouldn't, I'd give you a USPS reference number, which you could use to calculate shipping costs as well as actually mail me a thing; only the USPS would be able to link the reference number to my physical location. There's almost certainly problems with this idea, which is why it's a napkin sketch.)

"USPS reference number" seems like it could work relatively similarly to a PO Box.

Main difference of course being that you want the ability to generate a unique "PO Box" per merchant.

Of course, there is a 3rd party (the post office in this case) that would need to know the mappings between real address and "reference number", but even in the case the post office got hacked at least they would only get your old mappings. Any new purchases would use new reference numbers.

You would also have to give the tax authorities the ability to lookup the reference number so they can calculate how much tax is owed. Taxes can very wildly even in the same zip code (some places are better than others about this).

I like the idea, but even with a one-time code, the post office has a record of the reference number which could be linked back to the transaction.

Along with some form of digital cash analogue (i'm not sure existing crypto is it), we'd be getting close to restoring some privacy in online transactions.

This would be cool mixed with kind of a flipped free shipping thing, where I pay USPS $x a year and they deliver me up to y packages a week/year/whatever with no additional charge. You give the reference number to the vendor, the shipping comes up as free, they print a label and ship.

Absolutely! The same way we say you have to hash and salt passwords so they're not useful for cross-site breaches, it's even more important for any other piece of information that is used to verify identity. Especially since these other pieces of info aren't easily changed and can't be different on different sites. Or, facts about a person shouldn't be considered secret for the purpose of authentication, but that's hard when people have trouble with being asked to keep track of any new secret pieces of information they are given.

Many people here will nod their heads along with you and then go back to their dayjob of warehousing as much personal data as they can get their paws on. Every time GDPR comes up the wailing and gnashing of teeth from HN is obnoxious, and yet every time there is a breach people are tutting.

These breaches are the personal fault of many of the people who frequent this site. As the FTC says - the first step here should have been not warehousing data they didn't need for their business purposes. Which is the mandate of GDPR as well.