Would a Post Office Bankruptcy Kill E-Commerce?

MountainLogic writes: With the U.S. Postal Service slated to run out of money this summer, a congressional bailout has become embroiled in the usual, critical and unusual political fights. Every day letter carriers deliver some of our web orders, there are many other functions the post office performs including providing an address validation API that is the core of many shipping systems. Would the collapse of this service mean a major disruption of e-commerce? What other impacts to technology would we face with the collapse of this constitutionally guaranteed service (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7). Are there other services that the post office could perform to gain revenue? For example, the post office is where many Americans who live outside of major metro areas go to get a passport. A U.S. passport is the gold standard of ID. Could the post office become the ultimate place to go to validate ID and act as a signing authority? If you forget your password, go in to your local post office, show ID and reset your password. Seems like financial institutions would happily pay a few cents per reset to prevent billions in identity theft. Is there any other institution in America that could perform such a service on this scale. How else can the post office become more relevant and more solvent? Is profitability even a reasonable standard as we do not hold DoD to such a standard?