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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> 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.)

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"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.

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