alt Hacker News> Stripping information from an identifier disconnects a piece of data from the real world which means we no longer can match them. But such connection is the sole purpose of keeping the data in the first place.
The surrogate key's purpose isn't to directly store the natural key's information, rather, it's to provide an index to it.
> The solution is not to come up with yet another artificial identifier but to come up with better means of identification taking into account the fact that things change.
There isn't 'another' - there's just one. The surrogate key. The other pieces of information you're describing are not the means of indexing the data. They are the pieces of data you wish to retrieve.
Any piece of information that can be used to retrieve something using this index has to be available "outside" your database - ie. to issue a query "give me piece of information identified by X" you have to know X first. If X is only available in your index then you must have another index to retrieve X based on some externally available piece of information Y. And then X becomes useless as an identifier - it just adds a level of indirection that does not solve any information retrieval problem.
That's my whole point: either X becomes a "real world artifact" or it is useless as identifier.