Unfortunately ZKP's aren't magic.

When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone.

Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity.

They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.

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consumer451 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Assuming that perfect is the enemy of good, this is still better than all the proposed alternatives, isn't it?

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coppsilgold 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

With ZKP age verification, services will not be able to track you without help from the CA. The CA will not be able to track you without help from the services. Both will contain the necessary information in their databases that when combined deanonymize you. The CA is the central authority/certificate authority.

So you should assume the government can track you, because you should assume both will be streaming those identifiers to it.

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ekr____ 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This isn't correct. With ZKP-based systems even the CA can't track you. That's the "zero-knowledge" part.

	▲	nubg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		but how is that possible? that even the CA cannot track you?

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consumer451 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, there is one party that can track you, which in some countries is still slightly trusted.

Ideally, no age verification would be required or proposed. However, if it is, this implementation should be the base minimum, should it not?

This is a gazillion percent better than a foreign corporation being in charge, isn't it?

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krupan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Better than no age verification (and therefore, privacy) coupled with parents doing their job?

	▲	consumer451 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That would be ideal. However, this is tech proposal which takes so much of the slop out of the entire thing. With this implementation, there is no profit in it, unless your government is directly cooperating, aka a scandal in many countries.

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Nursie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't really believe this is true, there are schemes which allow limited use tokens but which don't compromise the ZK nature of things - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...