Your evidence is already stored with the gov, regardless of the any age verification systems. And the gov provides your token. If you honestly don’t know, you should research instead of making assumptions.

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet

We can’t compete with a country that pays their workers $1/hr without doing the same.

There is no encryption involved. They just give you a token that verifies your age and you present the token to the site.

Beijing has the highest hourly minimum wage (RMB 26.4/US$3.7 per hour)

I don’t know what you’re arguing for either. It sounds like we agree it is unsustainable.

According to whom?

If it works the way they claim it is indeed very private.

Yes but after they win they have to raise prices…

Okay but why? No thank you.

All of them that I know of. Which corporations do you see running unsustainable business models until they fold completely? Take your time, I’ll wait.

The point is that they eventually change their tactics. In this case, they’ll have to eventually increase their prices.

Like all things in China, this is owned by the government, making it pointless.

It didn’t work for Walmart the same way it didn’t work for Amazon

Thus, not sustainable, as I said.

the Chinese are really good at low cost manufacturing

They’re not “good” at it, they just have no minimum wage and no semblance of annoying things like worker protections or unions to be concerned with.

I wasn’t trying to make any sort of argument why they should be doing that, only why they are.

I honestly don’t know how to be more clear. It’s called a social graph. The most important thing about a social network, above everything else (for normies), is having lots of users. Cory and Molly both know and understand that if they left Xitter, they would lose access to a substantial amount of their audience, so they both stay, despite being some of the platform’s harshest critics and the biggest supporters of it’s alternatives. That’s the answer to the question “why would anyone use it?”. The social graph.

You forgot the part where they raised prices on everything.

The financial fuckery is that they’re very heavily subsidized by the CCP. It’s not sustainable.

Once again, not talking about Mastodon

You’re missing the point. Ask yourself why those people are still there.