Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

Age assurance, porn access, and broader regulation fears

• Many see age-gating as the thin end of the wedge toward “internet usage permits” tied to government ID via corporate intermediaries.
• Supporters argue that current reality—young kids rapidly reaching extreme porn or misogynistic content—is unacceptable, and some form of gatekeeping is needed.
• Others warn that once infrastructure exists, “adult-only” classification can shift to LGBTQ topics, birth control, or other disfavored speech.

Parents vs state: who should protect kids online?

• One camp: this is fundamentally a parenting problem; empower guardians with better device-level filters and education, not global identity systems.
• Counterpoint: that only protects kids with “the right kind of parents”; schools, devices, and platforms undermine parental control, so legislation is a legitimate tool.
• Some argue harsh criminal enforcement against producers/distributors (as with child sexual abuse material) is preferable to mass ID systems.

Architecture: MDOC, secure elements, and unlinkability

• The scheme builds on existing digital ID formats (e.g., MDOC) issued by governments (DMV/passports) and stored on devices.
• A secure element (phone chip, smartcard, or similar) holds a key that “binds” the credential to a device and biometric, preventing easy sharing.
• The ZKP layer lets a site verify properties (e.g., “over 18”) without seeing extraneous attributes (e.g., name) and aims for “unlinkability”: repeated uses can’t be tied to the same person, even if site and issuer collude.
• Revocation is a hard unsolved tradeoff: real‑time checks reintroduce timing/correlation risks.

Bypassability, sybil issues, and limits

• Commenters stress that any such system can be bypassed (sharing devices, hardware attacks, proxies, foreign VPNs), so it mainly raises the bar for naïve users.
• Sybil‑like concerns remain: if even one legitimate user colludes to “rent” their credential, they can front for many others, limited only by biometrics and hardware friction.

Trust model: wallets, big tech, and openness

• A core criticism: the protocol assumes a “wallet” implementation that can see both user data and relying sites; a malicious wallet can secretly leak usage patterns.
• Some jurisdictions (e.g., EU) plan to require open‑source, “blessed” wallets, potentially with reproducible builds, which mitigates but does not eliminate trust concerns.
• Debate over whether users can run their own clients or must rely on government‑approved / big‑tech software and secure hardware.

Technical ZKP discussion and pedagogy

• Several intuitive explanations are shared (Where’s Waldo, “Ali Baba cave”, paint/Fiat–Shamir transform), plus links to primers and videos.
• Non‑interactive ZK is explained as simulating interactive protocols by deriving verifier “challenges” from hashing prior transcript and public inputs (Fiat–Shamir).
• Some clarify why simple “over‑18 token” constructions aren’t truly zero‑knowledge if proofs are deterministic and linkable.

Comparisons to other ZK systems

• The scheme is described as circuit‑based and compatible with existing ECDSA hardware, targeting client‑side proofs on commodity phones (single‑threaded, no GPU).
• It’s contrasted with systems like BBS/BBS+, Idemix, and blockchain‑oriented SNARK/STARK frameworks: those are seen as either more complex for this use or slower on this specific credential problem.
• One commenter notes external benchmarks where this approach is ~10x faster than other candidate systems for identity proofs on the same hardware.

Potential applications and enthusiasm

• Supportive comments highlight this as a major privacy win versus naive “send your ID scan to every site” approaches, with applications to:
  • age checks,
  • political‑affiliation proofs,
  • SSN‑style identity attributes,
  • anonymous payments and micropayments,
  • zkTLS (proving facts about remote accounts without revealing identity).
• Others remain wary of centralization, regulatory creep, and dependence on large vendors, while still conceding that this is “strictly better” than current non‑private age‑verification schemes.