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Comment by tr33house | Hacker News Reader

When I was in college, I'd come up with a similar concept for creating addresses for the developing world. For those that don't know, most of the world actually doesn't have any address and the governments have no plans in place to solve this.

Basically have a third party DNS like company and all it would do would be digital addressing. Since we would also deliver the mail, there was the added benefit of not sharing your actual address, temporarily sharing it, having alternatives based on day, kind etc and potentially just sharing your phone number as your address etc etc

Looking back, this would've been a great company but one that almost no investor would fund

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I have never understood this. You build a house somewhere, develop your existence, etc.. Surely you have a way of telling others where you live? Simply give your place a name, if there are multiple buildings there, give them numbers, et voila you have an address. Why isn't this what is happening? Isn't this what happened everywhere where there are addresses? We don't have street names and numbers, because a central number authority chose to assign them, we have them because humans give things names in order to refer to them. So whenever someone is claiming that there are people living without an address, I find that incomprehensible.

how will people (i.e. postal service) find this address if there is no central authority?

Look at the street sign, like they did it everywhere else?

And which street would that be?

Huh?

People live somewhere that doesn't have a name yet. They are going to name it anyways since they talk to others (I live near the new bridge). Eventually someone is hanging up a sign "new-bridge-street" and the name standardizes so bypassers will get to know the name also.

Isn't that how street names came into existence everywhere?

before centralization, maybe. currently how do you think the post office will know some randos hung a sign saying "new-bridge-street" somewhere? Do you think they browse the streets to observe latest changes? Feels like I am talking to a teenager.

> most of the world actually doesn't have any address and the governments have no plans in place to solve this

I thought we were talking about a situation, where there is no system already in place? Either there is no postal service, so this will be bootstrapped as well, if people care about mail, or there is already. In the latter case, they either have a system, in which case there would be in fact an address system, so it is irrelevant for the current consideration, or they don't. While I don't know how this state is supposed to exist, streets signs from randos would be an improvement so, why wouldn't they adopt it?

Also in case the local authority doesn't care anyway, you only need to convince your local delivery guy who lives next door and faces the same problem.

Completely different benefit proposal, but doesn't what3words kind of do this?

Giving your lat and long solves this, without recourse to proprietary systems, similar sounding words or requiring a proficiency in the English language.

What 3 words is pants.

The problem with lat/long at this resolution is -> Too many numbers. Get one wrong and you are somewhere else. what3words identifies the correct problem, provides a solution, but I agree that it has its flaws. I wish some independent org can come up with a better standard that addresses those.

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