For political reasons the U.K. (and US) are opposed to having identity cards so that isn’t really a workable solution. 8 think it’s also inaccurate to say that your address for the purposes of banking is ‘anything one can write on a letter to have the Royal Mail deliver it to you’. For example, you probably can’t give the address of a hotel where you’re staying.

They're also against having a population register.

Denmark has a population register ("CPR") [1], but does not have identity cards. It's required that you update your address in the register if you move house or emigrate.

Everyone also has a NemKonto ("EasyAccount"), which is a nominated bank account linked to the CPR (somehow) to receive payments from public institutions. That should make fraud of this type even more difficult.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Centrale_Personregister

It's probably more accurate to say that it's any residential address that, in the case of the US, is in the USPS address database. Though there are probably exceptions.

I don't understand the issue considering HMRC has a record of every taxpayer? Are these people who are against ID cards also not paying taxes?

As fun as those ways to address a postcard are, they are not addresses that the bank will accept. The bank checks against a database of valid addresses; this is a common problem for people that have just built a house - most companies used cached databases so refuse to accept your address until it has trickled down.

Firstly, they have no authority to refuse - if I have just moved to a new address, the bank had a legal obligation to deliver my monthly statements, letters, etc. Their database is their problem, I have lived at new addresses and every serious institution has a way to manually enter abtirary address. You might get some nonsence from the customer service person and might have to speak to a manager to get it sorted, but if you show up with contract of purchase for a new house that states your address, they can't turn you away.

I have also been registered with several improtant institutions at an address that does not exist, because the telephone operator made a mistake - and the address was preposterous, they have put me in a house number 15000. So they don't check much.

Thirdly, addresses are not real. They are a myth, like simultanous events in special relativity, they do not exist in the real world but people who never had to deal with them much don't realise it.

What we call an address is a set of instructions to the postman, and if that set of instructions gets the post to your door, it is valid. Anyone paying attentions should have noticed that they often recieve post with slightly different permutations of their address. And ofcourse I have given a few silly examples. But there are genuene addresses that are unkowable. I lived in a building that spaned 3 streets, (one for each side, the last side was a house). It had 2 entances and 2 addresses.

There are addresses that are not a {street}{housenumber}, there are addresses that are a grid and no map software knows how to deal with them

And lastly there are houses that have no 'official' address! A lone hamlet near the coast might have no name at all.

So the only way to determine if an address is real, is to sent a letter, and to see if it arrives.

>A lone hamlet near the coast might have no name at all.

In the US, a lot of addressing was rationalized to support E911 service. So for example, a "camp" (i.e. a cabin without utilities) I would sometimes rent used to just have a name. But at some point it got an address on the dirt road it sits on. They also did things like change a road segment name if there was a gap between it and another segment with the same name.