The government issuing everyone a smart ID that lets them attest anonymously to being of legal age would be better.

But there are age gate laws today, and calls to pass more of them. A hypothetical better way in the future shouldn’t excuse legally mandating a poor implementation today.

We could distribute scratch off cards to stores within a few months. It's incredibly low tech. I can't speak to elsewhere in the world but most (possibly all?) US states run lotteries.

If a given government body can't manage to stand up a web API to validate one time use codes within a few months then they clearly don't have the technical knowhow to manage smart IDs in a secure manner.

My point being that this either doesn't qualify as hypothetical, or if it does, then it indicates gross incompetence to an extent that precludes more complex solutions as a matter of course.

A proposed solution that does not actually exist and is not proven to work is necessarily a hypothetical one. I'm not ruling out various state governments also being incompetent though.

Right, only for Andretard and iPhonys, ensuring the monopoly will be there to stay.

This is actually a great idea. It is even compatible with having private companies run the system. The real issue is distribution (online code verification is trivial). Tbf I believe that a fully government-owned anonymous system should be the goal. The government knows you already, so creating a proof of age anonymous token should also be somewhat trivial. Truth is companies don’t want to forgo the potential profit in data mining, and governments don’t like the actual lack of control and full anonymity, otherwise we’d have this already worldwide

In theory I agree. In practice I have severe misgivings about directly incorporating government issued IDs into mundane online transactions.

I don't want "papers please" to be normalized. If the smart ID can do anonymous attestation of age then it can presumably also share various details with a requesting party. Next thing you know Facespace 365 is requiring you to provide your (attested) full legal name in order to register an account. I find that to be a highly objectionable outcome.

If things escalated beyond basic age checks that also adds hardware requirements. Would I find myself needing a smartcard reader to do anything online? The friction of needing to visit a bank in person seems like a feature to me.

What doesn't bother me is age restricted content guarded by a low fence. The bare minimum required to blunt the impact of something that appears to be analogous to an epidemic.

I may not have been following this topic closely, but I do like this suggestion. Truly anonymous age tokens should be a thing.

However, we're not going to get that because politicians would just say it is open to abuse. Anyone can go to a liquor store and supply alcohol to minors. The same would apply to anonymous age tokens. I don't know if it would be a big issue in practice, but it will in the minds of politicians.

Well first of all people shouldn't have to pay an extra tax to go online, no matter how small, because that $1 won't be $1 for more than a year even if it was legislated to start that way.

Also if such identification cards are that easy to get, it is inevitable that the majority of kids are going to get access to them. I or somebody else could go across town to different stores, get 30 different ID cards, and then sell them for $15 a piece. And that is of course assuming foreign states and people don't break or circumvent the situation and sell ID codes online.

I wouldn't be too concerned about the price. Left to private business it should remain cost competitive. Monopolized by the government legislation dictating the price be set at a small percentage plus costs should be sufficient.

Sure, you could enter the black market. Presumably that would carry similar penalties as selling alcohol to minors. People certainly do that but at least my personal experience growing up in the US was that it was substantially easier to come by narcotics in highschool than it was alcohol.

Why would a foreign state bother to interfere with such a system? Violations are even less harmful than underage alcohol consumption. (Which is itself typically fairly benign. I will never understand why people in the US make such a big deal out of it.)

If you worry about every possible thing that can go wrong you will inevitably arrive at a surveillance state. Thus these eventualities need to balance the downsides imposed by any solution with the downsides of circumvention or other abuse. In this case all that's required is a very minor but legally enforced speedbump to force the hand of website operators and nudge cultural norms towards a healthier place.

Why would foreign bodies interfere? Because it is easy money. Unless you limit the number of, and therefore access to, ID verification proofs it will inevitably be sold on the open market to any and all people. And when the problem comes up, will the state admit failure and cancel the program? Unlikely. They will more likely spend far more effort on personally identifying each person online "for the children" which just puts us back at the same problem again, except minus the cost of this whole ID verification scheme that shouldn't exist to start with.