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We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.
Why stop at hex? You could use the entire alphabet. Even if you take only uppercase letters and numbers, we are at 36^9 possible numbers. If we include lowercase and special characters from ASCII, we can go much further.
It's all fun and games until you're assigned an SSN that contains a profanity. Because you know there's a strong chance they'll forget to implement a check for that until someone complains, and an even stronger chance that something that looks like a profanity will escape the first implementation of checks.
e.g. There will be someone assigned IMABUM123 and a) that will get through the understaffed / automated profanity check (no four letter words) and b) the person who gets it will have so many problems getting people to believe that it's really their SSN, including the people who could assign them a new one.
You can actually get a new SSN already, if you have strong cultural or religious issues with your SSN https://faq.ssa.gov/en-us/Topic/article/KA-02220
So no need to implement a check in software, let the people do it for you.
The most common reason to get a new number is because you were the victim of identity theft. The gross part is that getting a new SSN doesn’t actually remove your old SSN. It just ties your new SSN to your old one; You can use either one interchangeably, because the new one just automatically routes back to the old one. This means there are now two numbers that can be used to steal your identity, instead of just one. And it doesn’t prevent the people who already have your old number from continuing to use it.
Or language changes when the kids make new profanities.
E. G. For storage and performs reasons. 5 bytes vs 9 bytes. Multiplying by amount of users and various indexes - can produce very noticeably difference. More records per page.
If we say that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today, but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it's ASCII only and doesn't support UTF-8 etc.).
Furthermore, the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.
If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.
This man backs ends^
Just use IPv6