It definitely will be a problem, but it will be a legal problem, not a software problem. Even if the systemd devs decided to revert this commit and never collect age data, the law would still be just a shitty as it is now.

If this law said that everyone needed to provide a phone number instead of a birthday, would everyone here be just as angry at the Bell Labs developers who wrote the GECOS standard?

Has anyone even looked at the PR? Why is there such a big stink about adding an optional birthday field to a JSON schema? It’s opt-in and can’t be validated in any way.

That’s like saying OpenSSL is the thin end of an anti-encryption wedge because they provide FIPS compliant modules. Or complaining that it puts your privacy at risk when you generate an SSH key and it asks for your address.

The problem is the laws getting passed, not with software that gives people a choice about whether to comply.

Not the person you’re talking to, but it seems like a stretch that some little nightclub will want to build and maintain their own smart contract infrastructure. It’s not just issuing the tickets, it’s also building and distributing the tools to quickly validate the hundreds/thousands of attendees every night.

For example, it’s not enough just to validate that everyone at the gate has an NFT. I could enter the venue with a valid token, and then transfer it to my friend still outside once I’m through the door. So now the bouncer needs to track what tickets have already been scanned, and you probably want it to update off-chain (faster and no gas fees).

Not that I can pretend to know what already goes in to a venue supporting TicketMaster, but I figure there’s got to be a reason why these middlemen were wanted in the first place. That reason is probably about venues wanting to do music and not tech support.