No it really can’t. Age verification requires identification.

Even if you could anonymously verify age to issue a “confirmed adult” credential, the whole chain of trust breaks down if one bad actor shares their anonymous credential and suddenly everyone is verifiably an adult.

The solution to that attack is naturally to have some kind of system for sites to report obviously-shared credentials. Which means tracking.

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goda90 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's already authorities that know your age, so verifying age with them to get the credential isn't the part that needs to be anonymous. The issue is them knowing what you do with your credential, which anonymous credentials solves by making it impossible to track tokens back to the credential holder. As far as sharing, there are some possible mitigations.

	▲	dpark 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right. And the possible sharing mitigations generally amount to tracking. This isn’t even getting to the issue that mandating government-issued credentials is the “foot in the door”. If you mandate the use of government creds for accessing websites, it’s an obvious step to turn around and demand that sites report credential use to “fight credential fraud”.

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armchairhacker 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But likewise, someone can share (or have stolen) their ID

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951372