15 ms·
Unfortunately ZKP's aren't magic. When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verific
by coppsilgold 3mo ago
Unfortunately ZKP's aren't magic.
When not doing privacy oriented cryptocurrency (cough money laundering cough) with ZKP's, if you really want private verification you are in a position where a single actor can authenticate the entire world and no one will know it happened. And to prevent it you assemble the pieces necessary to deanonymize anyone.
Make no mistake. ZKP age verification, as proposed, will just require multiple parties to collude to figure out your identity.
They can't even implement ZKP for remote attestation due to the auth-the-world problem.
- consumer451 3mo agoAssuming that perfect is the enemy of good, this is still better than all the proposed alternatives, isn't it?
- coppsilgold 3mo agoWith ZKP age verification, services will not be able to track you without help from the CA. The CA will not be able to track you without help from the services. Both will contain the necessary information in their databases that when combined deanonymize you. The CA is the central authority/certificate authority. So you should assume the government can track you, because you should assume both will be streaming those identifiers to it.
- consumer451 3mo agoYes, there is one party that can track you, which in some countries is still slightly trusted. Ideally, no age verification would be required or proposed. However, if it is, this implementation should be the base minimum, should it not? This is a gazillion percent better than a foreign corporation being in charge, isn't it?
- consumer451 3mo agoI am a moron for writing this, ZKP is like magic like this. That is the entire point, and why I posted this.
- ekr____ 3mo agoThis isn't correct. With ZKP-based systems even the CA can't track you. That's the "zero-knowledge" part.
- nubg 3mo agobut how is that possible? that even the CA cannot track you?
- ekr____ 3mo agoThat's not really possible to explain in this space, unfortunately, but the overall idea is that there are mathematical techniques that allow you to prove that you have a valid certificate without revealing which one it is.
- coppsilgold 3mo agoAnd those types of schemes will never see the light of day, read what they are actually proposing to implement.
- krupan 3mo agoBetter than no age verification (and therefore, privacy) coupled with parents doing their job?
- consumer451 3mo agoThat would be ideal. However, this is tech proposal which takes so much of the slop out of the entire thing. With this implementation, there is no profit in it, unless your government is directly cooperating, aka a scandal in many countries.
- consumer451 3mo agoI am a moron for writing this, ZKP is like magic like this. I need to not HN after beers.
- Nursie 3mo agoI don't really believe this is true, there are schemes which allow limited use tokens but which don't compromise the ZK nature of things - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymous-credentials-an-illustrated-primer/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...
- coppsilgold 3mo agoThose schemes will never see the light of day, attribution is by design. Without attribution you will just see those tokens sold by the penny.
- Nursie 3mo agoIf you read the link, that’s not necessarily how things have to work. You can make limited-use ZK schemes, plus you fall into the usual trap of binary thinking, that if something isn’t 100% effective it is necessarily 0%.