It’s absolutely possible to have privacy-preserving age verification, but it requires government to trust someone else than themselves, which they’ll never do.

Go to gas station. Hand cashier your ID, like you do to buy liquor. Cashier gives you a one time use token/password to the age verification system website. You go there and upload a public key you generate before the OTP expires. Voila: now the site could easily verify that you control the private key and (trusting) that consequently you are of age, without having to know literally anything about you.

It only breaks if you treat everyone as a criminal until proven innocent (e.g. “you might have stolen that key”, etc), which is exactly what every government implementing this is doing, which is why it’s not really about protecting kids from porn at all but about removing privacy.

In other news, virginity-preserving sex falls apart on contact with reality.

I’m not very convinced by this article. A lot of the “realities” are not, they’re policy choices. Just as an example, the notion of the non-driving elderly adult having to be taken by their child to some office to get an ID is just a consequence of the US choosing not to have compulsory and free or nominal charge ID for all residents. Most of the other objections are equally dependent on specific policy choices, which may apply in some places and not others.