I think growing/expanding your experience in life is good, but ya, I definitely don’t agree with that definition, that’s intense.

Thank you for your dedication to the cause

some of them, especially in cryptography, are definitely just straight up mathematicians

I just wanted to say, y’all are my people, we don’t agree on everything, but I’m glad to have moved to lemmy. The few channels mentioned here that I’m not subbed to, I’ll be checking out.

This is definitely in my top 2 YT channels, contending with Technology connections.

his poster has been on my wall for like 10 years, appreciate that dude

Very much agree, liked his old content a lot, don’t care to hear about his politics or opinion outside of tools.

Totally makes sense.

Ahh ya so I try to browse all communities, because who knows some new community might be interesting and I don’t want to miss it

Ya I get that, I just would prefer to see some content over others by a lot, like I don’t care that bdsm stuff is on the internet, but I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see furry art, zero problem with it existing, just don’t want it in my feed that’s all.

largely agree with this

• good faith arguments or just good quality comments or posts get upvoted
• lazy comments or posts get nothing
• bad faith or unnecessarily combative or ill intensioned comments get downvoted.

I almost never downvote a post, I’ll either block the instance, community, or person instead - I want a good feed

Right, I understand that perspective, but there is a way to do this with multi-party computation and some other cryptography where no one would have the actual power/be able to see the data/have control. The main issue is it’s expensive to run and no one would be incentivized to run it.

Not true, there are ways to do this privately with cryptography

If anyone is doing actual work trying to solve this please DM me, I’m interested in helping.

How?

Ya you could definitely do this way too. There is a standard that google came up with called private state tokens that would allow you to do this in a pretty clean way, if you were cool with using your governments portal.

Essentially you would login to the govt portal, they would issue you some limited set of tokens (let’s say 5) that would expire after 30 days. You would go to an age restricted website and sign up and that would “burn” a token.

You could use ZK on top of this to make sure that the same email address or some other “nullifier” piece of information was used, to prevent an 18 yo kid from selling their tokens to 17 yos.

Good point

You definitely can do this with cryptography, it’s a really hard problem, but I worked in this space for a number of years, it’s possible.

I worked in this field for 3 years, a lot of the core parts are written, but there are a few key pieces missing and no one has taken it to real production.

You can use a passport in pretty much any country and prove you’re over a certain age. Here is a demo: https://github.com/dog-18/dog18

The parts that are missing are primarily around making secure nullifiers, which prevents someone from reusing identities, but also without revealing any private information. We were pursuing research that allowed nullifier generation in MPC where none of the servers or the users knew the “salt” that their identity was hashed with, so no one could recover the original piece of unique data (like their passport number, even if a govt had a hunch about which passports signed up to a service) but it would also prevent them from signing up with multiple accounts. We got our funding cut pretty bad and management was a mess, so I left and that research I think was shut down. This really is the key part to actually make that viable in the real world though. It’s maybe a year worth of research and a year worth of production left to make that practical.

From personal experience, I went that route (open source non profit) and it ended up being a shit show, i wouldn’t assume it’s better. I think going the route of just producing things people want to make their life easier is somewhat reasonable. I’ve been having a bit of a time sorting this out myself.