One of my professors (Allen Downey at Olin College) loved to show his idea of system like this for postal addresses. The idea was that you would be issued a fa

One of my professors (Allen Downey at Olin College) loved to show his idea of system like this for postal addresses. The idea was that you would be issued a fake address that is a key within a database pointing to your current address as a value. So my address might be: 1532 Elm St. Faketown, PL Since PL is not a state, the postal service would know to look up the current address in this database, and would forward mail appropriately. They could then slap a label on it with the real address so that the postal carriers don't go crazy.