Hot take: I'm in favour of this.<p>There's actually been significant progress in developing privacy-preserving attestation technologies in the last few years, that could enable anonymous age verification for adult websites.<p>There's an IETF protocol called Privacy Pass (see RFCs 9576-9578) that can attest facts about clients (e.g. their age) in an anonymising manner. You reveal your age by showing your ID to an age verification service (e.g. a government run service, or a bank), but crucially not the reason _why_ you're proving your age (i.e. the bank doesn't know if you're visiting a porn site or a casino). That service gives you a bunch of signed tokens proving you're over the age of 18/21/whatever, and you can redeem a token on the porn/gambling/alcohol-purchasing website for access. It uses various fun bits of cryptography (e.g. blind signatures) to ensure anonymity for the user.<p>With such technologies, anonymous age verification becomes achievable. Now, whether age verification is inherently "bad" is up for debate, but that's a matter of opinion. Obviously this technology isn't infallible and it will be possible to work around, but we don't need a perfect solution here. Preventing 99% of children that would have viewed violent pornography from viewing it is a massive win, and the fact that we can do it in a provably-privacy-preserving manner using cryptography is very very cool.