this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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Sorry, not sufficient.
Not secure.
" I certify that somebody is >18, but I don't say who - just somebody "
This is an open invitation to fraud. You are going to create at least a black market for these certificates, since they are anonymous but valid.
And I'm sure some real fraudsters have even stronger ideas than I have.
What stops non-anonymous certificates from being sold?
If John Doe views way too much porn, then you expect the site to shut him down? They have no ability to track other site usage. The authorities have to block him after the 10,000th download.
At that point, why does the site need to know? Either the government blocks someone's ID or they don't
Not useful to look at it in such a black or white manner. The possibilities are presumably less, and surely not that obvious.
You're not solving any issue by losing privacy. The site itself "knowing" you're John Doe can't tell if that's correct or not. Only the government can verify that, so why give the info to the site?
Making the certs short-lived (a few minutes) and single use and having a rate limit for users could make it difficult enough with serious risks (if you make it a crime) for little profit (I doubt many kids will pay serious amounts of money to watch porn; definetly not drug-scale amounts of money).
You cannot make a certificate "single use" (except if it exists only inside a closed system).
The website generates a random value, your government signs a cert for that value. That's what makes it single use and zero trust.
I was using the wording of OP who seems to be talking about tokens. The service asks the trusted entity if the token is valid, the trusted entity deletes the token after the first time.