[vkou]

You can also just follow people around and look in their windows. Nothing prevents that other than laws and rules and social norms.

> In the real world, the system you propose absolutely will not function to the standards required by the people agitating for these systems. You can't "protect the children" if "children" can easily get their hands on anonymous access-granting tokens.

What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them? What's the difference between age-controlled liquor and an age-controlled token falling off the back of a truck?

You can introduce as many soft-verification systems as you want to tweak this. The roll of numbers doesn't become active unless installed in a dispenser that phones home when it is installed, for example. The empty bobbins containing the roll have to be returned to the oracle, and need to register installation in a dispenser. The dispenser can even count each dispensed ticket. The only requirement is that the sale and the process of paying for the sale isn't linked to the ticket. If you maintain that, the system is anonymous. If you break it, it's not.

[simoncion]

> What stops children from paying someone to buy beer and cigs for them?

I preempted this line of questioning. I'll quote the section for you:

  What you propose doesn't make stores any money, so either you have to spend a bunch of money to induce them to carry the tokens [1], or you have to have harsh penalties for "losing" shipments of tokens. If you risk harsh penalties for choosing to sell the tokens, why even bother? Stores put up with the risk of selling booze because it's *quite* profitable... selling 5c or 0c tokens absolutely is not.
  
  [1] Where does that money come from? From you and me, of course!

No business is going to risk any part of their business by selling seriously-age-restricted goods that they get essentially no profit from. In order to get a business to deal in them, either they will give zero shits about who gets the tokens (because there's no penalty for not caring), or they will get paid a lot of taxpayer money in order to make up for the state-imposed loss when they inevitably give some to under-eighteens. [0]

> The only requirement is that the sale and the process of paying for the sale isn't linked to the ticket.

Unless you make it turbo-illegal to link those pieces of information (even weakly), then those two pieces of information will be linked lickety-split. As aspenmaver mentions, lotto tickets are activated at time of sale by phoning home to -I assume- the issuer of the ticket, providing a ready-made mechanism to correlate which tickets are sold to which person. When the people who are crying to protect the under-eighteen from the "evils" of computing notice that under-eighteens are -shock! outrage!- still exposed to that "evil" despite this token-distribution scheme, they will demand any such laws be weakened or eliminated.

[0] ...or fail to strictly follow all of the regs when giving one to a "Token Commission" officer doing an undercover buy, as absolutely happens with alcohol sales...