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A comment on German town votes ‘No’ to street names. Parent comment

Re:German town votes ‘No’ to street names by freehunter on Monday February 04, 2019 @10:24AM (#19077006)
People are dismissing it because it already exists in multiple countries. In the US for example, you can get a PO Box and have the USPS forward that mail to your home address.

There are also companies that will do this for you with variations on the service (a registered agent is one example, the company Mailboxes Etc also offers this service), which some are dismissing based on "yeah but then a third party is handling your mail". But if your country's post office won't do it then the only alternative is to have a third party handling your mail.

This service exists, and people are dismissing the idea because it is not novel.

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Re:German town votes ‘No’ to street names by lisper on Monday February 04, 2019 @01:10PM (#19078853)
What you are describing is not the same as what I am suggesting.
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Re:German town votes ‘No’ to street names by freehunter on Monday February 04, 2019 @04:09PM (#19080661)
The only difference is that you have to send mail to a normal post office address and not a "hostname". Other than that, virtual PO Boxes exist and fulfill your basic requirement of "no one knows my home address", even if some of the behind-the-scenes implementation details aren't exactly the same (latency etc). We're not discussing something new, we're discussing low-level implementation details of an existing idea.

I'm not saying your dream is bad, which is why I didn't respond directly to you. What I'm saying is I don't think it's a novel/interesting idea for a startup to work on as I believe was being implied by the person I replied to. Even if it became a big business (which I doubt since even UPS/Fedex/Mailbox ETC don't have that many postal customers for their own services) it's just too easy for the national postal service to compete with if it was successful.

I think it is a great idea for the postal service to do, but it would be very risky for a startup to do, even by modern startup standards. The existing postal system is a marvel of efficiency already.

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Re:German town votes ‘No’ to street names by lisper on Monday February 04, 2019 @11:53PM (#19083106)
> The only difference is that you have to send mail to a normal post office address

Yes, but that's a big difference.

> I don't think it's a novel/interesting idea for a startup to work on

I ever said that, and neither did whiddershins. Not all novel ideas are good ideas for startups.

The internet itself was a very bad idea for a startup when it started out (much too capital intensive). That's why it was done by the government and not by a startup.

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