How many unique addresses can exist in Cardano?
Is a Cardano address common to SL and CL?
How far fetched would it be to consider using a single address for each product in a warehouse? If this is feasible, the value of this application is that it would allow for tracking an item from cradle to grave as it moves through different hands.
Thoughts?
Each Cardano wallet can have 2^64 unique addresses. And there are astronomical number of wallets.
I think it is fairly safe to assume that even addresses from a single wallet would be enough for all the possible goods and products 
CL is expected to have an account-based system, similar to Ethereum (at least on the KEVM chain), so I wouldn’t count on equality of addresses across layers.
Not only it is possible with no problems, but even more - I think it is a standard practice in a UTxO system. In the best case you ought to generate a new address each time you want to perform an operation. This is exactly why Daedalus has “Generate new address” button on the “Receive” tab )
Thanks for the reply.
This tells me the identifier part of a universal item identification system is already finished.
This new UPC has the advantage that it could be used to identify individual items in a series thereby actually being a Unique Item Identifier, not just a product line identifier as the UPC is. By using a Cardano address QR code or a QR code paired with some form of chip that makes the address available for reading via NFC or similar technology, a Unique Item Identifier could be “implanted” on every product made anywhere in the world.
Any item without a QR/chip pair corresponding to a Cardano address would simply be considered an undocumented product and that fact would become part of its history once a new address was assigned to it since we can now have both IDs for any item and short histories for any item. This would likely cause a significant drop in the value of the item and would be huge incentive toward not vandalizing the QR/chip pair.
I don’t think I have seen a serious effort at trying to get this implementation in motion on any crypto currency though the benefit seems very interesting. The ability to be certain that someone is the rightful owner of an item would be as simple as being able to read either part of the QR/chip pair.
The catch is that this system would be most useful and honored if implemented for the purpose of tracking the most expensive assets most people have but those assets are the ones people have the least incentive to track with a new and unknown protocol. Interesting problem.
Is there anyone working of anything of this nature?