We need this

Very good writeup.

I'll add a few more things.

- in EU, the age verification is using zero knowledge proofs and as far as I know it's mandatory to do it this way. This means that age verification is created from your digital ID, but it's probably unlinkable to your identity or your other verifications. Of course this would be easily bypassable by anyone, because if you can link infinite number of accounts with one id (and there's no way to distinguish it), they figured out they have to do app attestation. So EU that hates American corporations will force you to use stock Apple device or Android with Google stamp (GrapheneOS, or Linux desktop will not work by default). It's funny, because even the reference implementation is proudly open source. But it can't compile and run it yourself - well, you can, but the age verification will be invalid, because you don't have their attestation keys.

This is not forcing tracking or a privacy breach, but it's forcing you to a walled garden ecosystem of Apple and Google and into digital ids.

Check out https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2025/12/08/the-internet-and-computers-arent-what-they-used-to-be-why-your-apps-stopped-working-hardware-attestation/

People get very wrong ideas about how things work regarding preparedness. You can't buy insurance when your roof is on the fire.

Stressed people from Europe want Latin American residencies, because they are afraid of war. The first available appointment at immigration office in one of the countries is in August. And that's even before a single drone reaching their country of residence in Europe (not talking about Ukraine, people who wanted and were able to get out of Ukraine already did).

I don't think it's high probability that they need to. Just saying that it's non linear difficulty increase. You can't check some website, see that residency for your passport is easy today and assume you just get it when you need it. When SHTF it's gonna be an order of magnitude more difficult.

GM @cbeams