only be password reset in person I like that idea. I could see something like this being partnered with brick-and-mortar banks or grocery chains. Many banks

only be password reset in person I like that idea. I could see something like this being partnered with brick-and-mortar banks or grocery chains. Many banks already deal with validating ID's and in some cases have free or discounted notary services for their customers. Or at least some national / international chain store. Some grocery stores already partner with banks and have a bank in a percentage of their grocery stores. I'm in the middle of nowhere but my near-by town has a bank and a grocery store. The more I think about it, this would be more useful and scalable if it were not strictly an email service but rather an identity provider. Think SAML/Oauth provider that is highly extensible to email providers, app providers, SaaS /misc cloud providers, etc... A distributed LDAP managed by banks or grocery stores with simple and secure web front-end API's. By distributed I mean highly fault tolerant active-active in many regions and with many hourly backups in every region. LDAP can store email addresses, aliases, phone numbers and more. The management API would have to contain a distributed and highly detailed journal of who changed what, using some type of cryptographic proof. If a person changes their email provider, app provider, cell phone provider, or anything else for that matter... then their identity follows them. They would already have in place that which they wish to share publicly and that which companies can use privately to ID them. With retail on the way out, and lots of open space I not so sure about the idea of picking up unused buildings. That would be a monumental cost for a single service and probably quite challenging to get funding for. Real-estate is a good investment but comes with a high burn rate insurance, maintenance, security, code compliance, etc... I think this aspect would require a remarkable business plan for investors to not be highly skeptical.