I had a very dead simple idea which was to Do age verification combining two systems that are well known, one is the local notary public and the other a cryptographic authz,auth to do so.
An example of a system is this say you want your age verified, a number of local authorities like teachers, lawyers, DMV, notary can be authorized to verify ages of people in the community. When a person goes to get there age verified they can present them with the cryptographic hash — which they got from a hash —that this authority figure can pass on to a central server, The hash will contain no private information except for the fact that there is some service that wants to verify a claim: is the user > 18. The authority figure looks at this ID and just sends a yes/no signal back to the server asking for this. No id/PII is ever exchanged.
Then maybe some problems I can see with such a system, but nothing on the scale of how we do age and ID verification these days: storing IDs online in centralized enterprise servers which have so many threat actors acting against them.
Does something like this exist already or is someone building such a thing?