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You can do that without the blockchain using something like Estonia's 20 year old digital signature scheme. All you need is a private key, not distributed consensus 'not your keys not your porn' silliness. [1]

A blockchain doesn't help here because your personal identity is not a bearer token. If someone has your private keys they do not become you. And if they do have your private keys you better have some authority to revoke them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia

That's really cool, I don't know how I'd never heard about this before.

And yes, just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not advocating blockchain here, I have no stake in that stuff or any real understanding of it. But I do like the "digital signatures/attestations" idea. Thanks for sharing the wiki link, I'll have to do some more reading on Estonia's system.

I personally believe this should be controlled at a device level, not at a state or national level.

But on a theoretical basis, yes, you could use so-called "soul bound tokens" attached to an Ethereum address, for example, for this use case. A soul bound token is similar to an NFT, but cannot be traded. It is bound to a particular address. So in theory, you could go through some service provider for the identity verification, give them an Ethereum address to attach the 18+ SBT to, and then you could simply sign a message from that address for any website that required 18+ verification (would cost no gas, it's just a signature).

See Vitalik's blog post on SBTs for more info: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html

> although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18

Obviously I can’t tell you how to raise your own children, but you yourself are seeing that porn is harmful at least up to a certain age. It’s especially good to prevent porn during a child’s formative years.

I would argue that porn isn’t good for anyone really, considering at least the following factors:

1. Like a drug, it numbs the senses and leads to the consumer needing more and more extreme content to feel the same level of satisfaction as before.

2. It’s not clear whether or not the female participants are consenting or not. Not too long ago PornHub got a lot of heat for spreading videos of the abuse of minors on their platform. They ended up having to purge millions of their videos because consent could not be verified. So imagine if God forbid you or your child unknowingly watches these types of abuse.

3. It changes the viewer’s attitude to women. Porn portrays women as public toilets, no dignity or honour whatsoever.

4. If you’re fine with other people’s daughters acting in these videos, then ask yourself: would you accept that for your own womenfolk?

There is more to say, but let’s move on.

You can technically bypass this using a VPN. What this law practically does is adding an additional hurdle for children from seeing this stuff, and that’s something good. Adults on the other hand, are generally speaking capable of setting up a VPN to bypass whatever filter they want.

Your first point is the only one that stands for non-straight porn.

2 and 3 don’t apply to gay porn for obvious reasons.

Point 4 probably has more to do with your proximity to sex workers than anything. I have plenty of friends that make their own amateur porn, to me there’s nothing wrong with it. Also, living in sf, I’ve also met plenty of professional gay performers. They’re just like you and I, but they have a more interesting line of work.

My point is not to say that the effects of porn are all positive, but that your issue with porn might have more to do with the way society treats women and sexuality than it does with porn itself.

All porn is bad. It is detrimental to individuals and society, regardless of age. It's addictive nature is at legendary status. It blows up marriages and twists the expectations of sex to be convenient and casual instead of a long lived relationship that is worth personal sacrifice.

It's like a drug that attaches to your love receptors preventing you from really loving and receiving love. And most steeped in its grasp don't even know it because it is hard to explain color to someone that has only ever seen black and white.

Your relationship with pornography isn't everyone's relationship with pornography.

So many people run around thinking that they are the exception.

Re 2: they just deleted all videos where they couldn't 100% verify things, as a "better safe than sorry" kind of strategy. The overwhelming majority of these videos were fine. I'm not saying there wasn't any problem on PornHub, but I feel the scope of it has been rather overstated, and any platform that allows user-generated content suffers from these problems: YouTube, Facebook, even Hacker News.

Re 1 and 3: I hate to be that guy, but I think "citation needed" is an appropriate request for these. Especially for "3", which seems rather strong.

Re 4: This is a little bit like "would you want your daughter to work at Wall-Mart?" Probably you will have higher hopes for your children than to work near-minimum wage all their lives.

Yeah, no real argument from me on most of that.

I'm mostly hesitant due to my own understanding of my own desire to see naked women when I was a teenager and, to be crude about it, a pretty constant desire to jerk off.

Obviously ideally my kids will stick to their imaginations and consenting partners, that's what I would wish for for them if I could.

But I'm not sure it's a totally realistic expectation, and one of the weird things about being a parent but also a person who was once young is that I want my kids to have the opportunities to come to their own conclusions about what's good and bad for them.

As another example, I don't want my kids to drink or smoke pot before they are of legal age to do so. And ideally, maybe never? But at the same time, occasionally doing that stuff when I was a young man was fun, and formed good memories and social bonds. While it's my role as a parent to set rules that they can't do those things, to issue consequences if I catch them smoking weed or drinking it whatever, I also understand the desire and think tm there's a certain... benefit, I guess, to their attempts to circumvent my rules?

I realize I'm pretty much contradicting myself repeatedly here, and also failing to take a hard beneficial moral stance... but that seems to be part and parcel to the experience of being a parent but simultaneously remembering being a kid.

Thanks for sharing your PoV.

The way I look at parenting is that initially it’s guarding and restrictive, but slowly one lets go in such a way that the child is on a good path in life. So the way I look at it is that it’s a parent’s responsibility to provide some kind of framework. Then different parents may obviously argue what that framework should be…

Blind signatures to the rescue?