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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That's already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they're given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously "true" if they can successfully complete the verification).
So, here's how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.
In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one's digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.