[refibrillator]

No disrespect but paying to verify age feels absurd, let alone putting a private company in charge of what should be an essential function of the government.

How about when you turn 18 or whatever the government gives you a signed JWT that contains your DOB? Anyone who needs to verify your age can check that and simply validate the signature via a public key published by the government.

Simply grab a new JWT when you need it, to ensure privacy.

And sure, sprinkle in some laws that make it illegal to store or share JWTs for clearly fraudulent intents.

> the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes

This feels like it comes from an affluent perspective, where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse, there will always be someone’s older brother etc who will do this for $20 because he’s got nothing to lose.

[triceratops]

> where I grew up it was trivial to acquire these things and much worse

So you think we shouldn't card for cigarettes or alcohol either? I'm confused.

[lokar]

If kids can get the card from the liquor store, then they can get physical pornography there as well.

[wolvoleo]

And they can get porn from all those sites that don't obey laws anyway, like a gazillion torrent sites. So yeah what's the point really. You're not preventing anything.

Also I'm pretty sure we all watched porn when we were under age and didn't get anything from it.

When I was young internet wasn't accessible for consumers yet but I built a pay TV decoder so I could watch their porn at night. It was easy enough. Only did black and white and no audio but it didn't really matter for that purpose :)

Still, I never got the idea that this was normal sex and I've always treated women with the utmost respect.

[tbossanova]

So they give you their jwt for 20 instead