alt Hacker News> The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes
Not all of them.
The solution currently undergoing large scale field testing in the EU uses cryptography (specifically zero-knowledge proofs) to allow you to anonymously prove to a site that your government issued ID shows you are above the site's minimum age, without the site getting any information about your real identity.
I've seen articles on that. What I do not like about that is one has to trust that is really the way the system works and that special people do not have a special API key to get their own hash from the adult site related to a user ID and then submit that has to a special API end-point to reverse or undo the anonymization. Having been a liaison to law enforcement I just assume that is a thing but I am also fine with people saying I am paranoid. A header does not require this level of trust nor a dependency on a third party see recent Cloudflare outage.