Age checks aren't about kids, the essay argues — they're a switch for attributing speech

The essay's actual argument: age gating is identity plumbing

The nonogra.ph post makes one claim and presses on it: "These 'age verification' laws are - by design - identity attribution systems." The reasoning is procedural. To act against speech, a state needs two things: what was said and who said it. Today the second half is expensive — OSINT, subpoenas, working around VPNs. An age layer that binds accounts to an SSN or government ID automates it. The author's prediction of where that leads: "Post an inconvenient message about a politician, or get a little too rowdy in a group chat, and you'll get a letter in the mail or a knock at the door," the way ISP copyright warnings already arrive. The prescription is thin — don't verify, don't give up your identity, and if you absolutely must, pay an age-verification service in Monero.

The thread doesn't argue the conclusion — it argues the plan, and the facts

The most pointed reply accepted the danger and rejected the remedy:

"Some nerds, for lack of a better term, think crypto and cryptography are the answers to every privacy problem. The only way to fix society and the law is by engaging with those things. Not sidestepping them… The only group competent enough to oppose identity verification has its head in the sand." — triceratops, an engineer with 0.8 karma weight

Two voices challenged the essay's central equivalence directly — that age check equals identity handover:

"The proposed EU verification system provides a proof of age to the service but no physical identity data. This is possibly a slippery slope, but I don't think it's correct to state the two things are equivalent." — riffraff, a remote engineer in Budapest

Someone living under one of these regimes brought receipts the essay lacked:

"Within the last decade in the UK we have had… the 2016 Snoopers' Charter… the 2023 Online Safety Act… and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs… The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect." — boomskats, writing from the UK

And the most uncomfortable angle came from a YC-founder account that flipped the room's politics:

"It de-anonymizes everyone, including children, and with the first exploit and dump of the database (which will absolutely happen), all those children's real identities will be known to every predator in the world." — SwellJoe, YC W07, who works on Virtualmin

The disagreement that ran hottest wasn't optimist-versus-pessimist. It was strategic: a contingent argued the policy has genuine bipartisan support driven by frightened parents, so refusing to verify and paying in Monero changes nothing. As one engineer put it, the technical crowd has "a real blind spot here" — the people pushing age checks aren't politicians chasing censorship, they're parents scared of social media, and the only move that scales is convincing them the harms outweigh the benefits.