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Show HN: Anonymous Age Verification

(gist.github.com)
70 points jwally | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 17:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.349s | source

So I'm not an expert in this area, but here's an attempt at cost effective, anonymous, age verification flow that probably covers ~70% of use cases in the United States.

The basic premise is to leverage your bank (who already has had to perform KYC on you to open an account) to attest to your age for age-restricted merchant sites (pornhub, gambling, etc) without sharing any more information than necessary.

Flow works like this:

1) You go to gambling.com

2) They request you to verify your age

3) You choose "Bank Verification"

4) You trigger a WebAuthn Credential Creation flow

5) gambling.com gives you a string to copy

-------------

6) You log into your bank

7) You go to bank.com/age-verify

8) You paste in the string you were given

9) The bank verifies it/you and creates a signed payload with your age-claims (over_18: true, over_21: false)

10) You copy this and go back to gambling.com

---------------

11) You paste the string back into gambling.com

12) You perform WebAuthn Auth flow

13) gambling.com verifies everything (signatures, webauthn, etc)

14) gambling.com sets a session-cookie and _STRONGLY_ encourages you to create an account (with a pass key). This will prevent you from having to verify your age every time you visit gambling.com

The mechanics might feel off, but it feels like this in the neighborhood of a way to perform anonymous age verification.

This is virtually free, and requires extremely light infra. Banks can be incentivized with small payments, or offer it because everyone else does and don't want to get left behind.

1. kkfx ◴[31 Aug 25 20:37 UTC] No.45086842[source]▶
No thanks.

A valid and safe "age verification" (actually to be BANNED because meant as a way to pass internet censorship) could simply be: the State offer FLOSS and open-hardware IDs, we got a USB reader/built in in keyboard, built-in in laptop like we have hat in early 2000, who being all open we can trust, and the a simple boolean request "above age?" with a true or false answer PERIOD.

If we want more we ERASE the not needed anymore banking sector with a state backed crypto and state backed open hardware and FLOSS wallets with a simple display usable as smartwatch or pendent with a retractable necklace like the one we use for skipass, where we could see on a trusted device what we are going to approve or reject.

It's time to craft rules as code, in money/finance and laws/bureaucracy ERASING nazi censorship we see growing everywhere starting with biometry push.