alt Hacker NewsThere are only two real ways to implement that. One is the "attribute certificate" is still tied to your full identity and then people won't be willing to associate them. The other is that the attribute certificates are fully generic (e.g. everyone over 18 gets the same one) and then someone will post it on the internet and, because there is no way to tie it back to a specific person, there is no way to stop them and it makes the system pointless.
Correct. In practice the latter isn't really possible because the issuer can always record the subject public key info, or the serial number, or a hash of the certificate, and they can then use that to identify the real subject. However for low-value things I might use them.