This is a really frustrating topic, because there are so many layers of wrong.

First you have people running around claiming that systems are "anonymous" and "privacy preserving"... meaning that they're anonymous if you trust somebody you shouldn't be trusting. Just simple snake oil. Often offered by people who know perfectly well what they're doing, too.

Then somebody like Matt Green writes something like this, or some standards committee decides to try to do zero knowledge right, or whatever. But (a) people don't understand how it's different from the snake oil, and (b) almost nobody understands how hard it is to get it right. Information wants to be free, and even if you have a perfect privacy-preserving protocol, it doesn't work if you embed it in a workflow that turns around and leaks the information you're trying to hide. So there are an infinite number of more mistakes to argue against.

But all of THAT just distracts from the fact that age verification is a bad goal. Setting up an ubiquitous, actually functional age verification tool is just handing weapons to people like, say, [Ken Paxton, Attorney General of the great state of Texas](https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5762893-paxton-opinion...). A system like that is an attractive nuisance that should not exist. What people like that will do with it is far worse than any problem it could possibly solve.

... and that fact gets lost in all the other stuff...