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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

To be specific, an NFT can be anything - even a Turing complete program - but common ones are simply containing a string of a URL.

Edit: I was loosely involved in some of the conversation around smart contract and token implementation on a top 10 chain and there’s actually a lot of interesting issues with on chain data, such as if child pornography is added suddenly in some countries hosting a node can be seen as distributing CP (so only allowing URLs and then having filters to remove that at a community level is an easy solution).

I currently only like NFTs as representations of digital licenses or tickets etc anyway, so simple hashes work for me.

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Digital licenses and tickets are useless if the central authority doesn't honor them. There's absolutely no benefit to making NFTs out of them.

For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?

That's not why making an NFT out of the ticket is interesting.

It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.

Only if the ticket seller wants you to be able to do that.

Remember, it's trivially easy to follow transactions on the block chain. So the ticket seller can see whether an NFT has been resold, and can just refuse to honour it. Or only honour the first wallet it was in, regardless of whether it is still there or not.

I think the idea may be to resell it as memorabilia - which might work for some rare or legendary performance, but, I think, in the typical case will be meaningless.

And even that works way better in physical form. For concerts I still order hardcopy tickets, because I collect them to go through them and remember what bands I have seen live and relive that memory. A digital NFT wouldn't give this justice enough for me.

I'm talking about it as a collectors item.

That is somewhat interesting. But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30776567

So ticket scalping. This was never desirable to anyone except the reseller in the first place. Concert goers hate scalpers, arrangers hate scalpers and the reseller adds no value to their service. I don't see how it's the least bit interesting.

It's interesting because it could be _my_ profit!

Nevermind the society or the environment. If money can be made, money shall be made, no matter how shady a business /s

'Scalping' ticket is actually useful for society, to be honest.

But yeah, everyone involved likes to say that they hate scalpers. So no one will do anything to help them.

I'm not talking about scalping.

Woodstock was a legendary event.

The tickets would now be considered collectors items.

In that sense you can already resell your Woodstock tickets on an open market. NFTs don't really add anything to this market in particular, so I don't get your point.

What's the incentive for the ticket seller to enable that?

Royalties. The ticket seller can set that and every time the ticket is resold, they will get % of that sale. For an artist that would mean they can sell a ticket with % royalty set and then profit from future sales on an ongoing basis.

So we want to create incentives for event organizers themselves to encourage scalping/resale of tickets. Can't see anything wrong happening there.

So... A method for scalping scalpers?

Pretty much. 1000 true fans is essentially the backbone of the NFT argument which basically revolves around artists and their fans parting ways with cash for collectable items. With NFT tickets, the artist always gets paid no matter who is selling the ticket and how many times it get sold. I would say that this is a win for the artist.

Well.. yes that would be a win for the artist. As would a sales tax that goes to artists, or a new law that legalizes pickpocketing for artists. Why is that a good thing? Why should an artist be compensated beyond the first transaction? If this concept took off, how long do you think it would take before Walmart begins taking a cut of every resale? They have just as much right to it as an artist.

Well you could argue that it wouldn't be Walmart that does it, it would be the producer so Samsung, Apple, LG, Asus, Acer etc would sell their products with a digital twin (NFT) which provides sales from future purchases.

That being said, it could reduce the need for new products/versions being created every other week. However, there would need to be a somewhat centralized 'marketplace' that facilities the second hand sales which is where Walmart could step in with some perks for selling with them.

Why not auction the tickets off in the first place?

They can do both. They get royalties on all resales.

If you don't tax resales, first auction will go for a higher price.

(Just like houses that come with less ongoing taxes or other burdens go for more money.)

Only if the authority recognizing the ticket allows it.

If they don't, then the name of the original buyer is likely part of the hashed information, and anyone else trying to use the ticket is out of luck.

NFTs still require recognition by the authority actually controlling the goods/services in question.

You can resell your paper, or email ticket already.

How does blockchain make it interesting?

Let’s you know the ticket is authentic because you can see it is part of the set of tickets the band/venue initially created, because of atomic transactions I can guarantee if I send you money I’ll get a ticket in return (NFTs are just another form of currency at the end of a day), because they’re unique I know no one else can own it even though it’s all public so I won’t have issues at the door, because they allow metadata the venue can confirm if they’re resellable or not on the NFT itself, a venue can get a % of resale value back allowing more second-hand markets to exist, among various other possibilities.

No need to expose yourself, possible anonimity and most important one, the absolute lack of need of a third party which is the thing that most find intresting about blockchains usecases.

Except the most common way to do blockchain transactions are broker services which do require user information. This, combined with the fact that the blockchain is an immutable public ledger (meaning any transaction can be traced back indefinitely), and there goes anonymity.

By brokers you mean Centralised Exchanges ? If yes I agree it's an aberation as we've with recently with Russia's problems people getting banned from it because these exchanges are bounded to obey country's laws. Everyone should leave CEXs to get on DEXs and learn about DeFi but as cool as it can be it's everything but userfriendly and as it is it'll never make it to public adoption. About tracing transactions as long as you don't dox yourself everything people can have about a wallet being yours is suspicions and there's always services to make it shady like tornadocash or anonimity oriented blockchains

> Everyone should leave CEXs to get on DEXs and learn about DeFi

That is not going to happen, for the same reasons why most people don't dig their own wells, learn carpentry to make their own furniture, or weave their own cloth and learn how to tailor clothes.

Every complex enough system will always have centralized points, aka. gatekeepers. That is how human society self-organises.

> That is not going to happen IT's actually being worked on, it's something sometimes refered as a "layer 3" even if it's not realy one when you look at what are layers 1 and 2 but the goal of this logical "layer" is to make abstraction of everything, make crosschain needs and moves absolutely transparent. It's one big point for mass adoption and great thinkers and workers know that and are already working on that.

>Every complex enough system will always have centralized points, aka. gatekeepers. That's where the problem is. 3rd partys have been introduced for security reasons but are nowadays far from it and that's what some people are actually fighting for. An autonomous system where the only pseudo 3rd party is an impartial public registry

> it's something sometimes refered as a "layer 3"

Again: Most people will not use a more complex solution when a simpler one exists, regardless of whether the simpler solution requires a central authority. Example: People used to use IRC, which is a really easy to use system. Then along came chatrooms, and then centralized messenger systems. Sure, some people still use IRC, but they are not the majority.

> That's where the problem is. 3rd partys have been introduced for security reasons but are nowadays far from it and that's what some people are actually fighting for.

Which systems are "far from it"? The financial system? I get my paycheck every month, all payment processes work fine. The government systems? Elections in my country work flawlessly, tallied and protected by central authorities. The power grid? I haven't had an outage in 4 years, and the last one lasted all of 10 minutes. Public Transport in my country is affordable, well maintained and usually on time.

So it seems to me that centralized systems work just fine in the vast majority of cases.

any society constrained by time and physical limits will tend towards this I think.

> No need to expose yourself, possible anonimity and most important one

That is an advantage if you're going to engage in behavior any reasonable person would despise you for.

> the absolute lack of need of a third party

If you're scalping tickets, you are the third party.

Anonimity and privacy on internet are a right and you don't need to do shady stuff to enjoy them and outside of the immediate risk caused by doxing oneself when having a heavily valued crypto/nft portfolio I agree that it's not always needed. It still should be an option though as when selling valuable stuff p2p some protection is always appreciated.

I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p makes you a third party and I don't care about the 2nd hand tickets market, I'm only intrested in a safe decentralized p2p market

I'm obviously not making a point against anonymity in general, so spare me the spiel.

> I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p makes you a third party and I don't care about the 2nd hand tickets market, I'm only intrested in a safe decentralized p2p market

The peers in this transaction are the event organizer and the person who ends up with a ticket. The ticket scalper is third party that "facilitates" the transaction at a cost. Essentially a broker that no one asked for.

"It's interesting because I can hoard tickets and resell at profit".

Why is that interesting, exactly?

Edit All that is marked as "interesting" in crypto is inevitably "how can I profit/get rich quick off something".

Usually the whole point of NFT tickets is to _stop_ you reselling on an open market (aka StubHub/Ticketmaster) and instead force you to either resell back to the venue, or to resell at face value only

Yikes. Not to mention there’s a public record of every ticket you’ve ever purchased. In many ways a blockchain is adtech done worst.

I honestly tried to come up with ideas for crypto / blockchain but every time someone pointed out how my solution could be done easier / better without blockchain. Blockchain is a problem looking for a solution to make more money.

In a proper market, it is impossible to resell because the sales price is the production price. So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match. At which point there is no point in being a scalper anymore.

Scalping is only an issue if the sales price of products is artificially depressed.

I didn't realize it was that easy to produce another Woodstock, or that the only purpose of music and festivals was profit maximization/economic equilibrium.

Silly me.

The whole point of capitalism is that economic equilibrium is also value equilibrium. So if you think it's good to have a Woodstock, unless you like artificial scarcity, you should think that having two Woodstocks is approximately twice as good. Now maybe you cannot produce another Woodstock, like there's some inherently limited resource like management effort or willingness or space or licenses, but that's the idea.

(I don't think that the capitalist ideal matches reality. But you should at least get the idea if you're gonna disagree.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30776666

Free market as imagined by libertarians can only exist in the presence of unlimited resources and magic.

You have it backwards.

Markets exist because of scarcity, not because of abundance. If something is available in unlimited abundance, there's no need of a market for it.

I don't think I got it backwards. This is the original statement: "In a proper market, it is impossible to resell because the sales price is the production price. So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match".

The only free market where this is possible is a magical place where there are unlimited resources and ability to create new Woodstocks at the snap of a finger.

No, grandparent is absolutely correct. It's not magic, if they charged what tickets are actually worth, there would be no scalpers. That is not a libertarian fantasy or anything close to it, in fact it's not even controversial.

> if they charged what tickets are actually worth, there would be no scalpers

Scalpers' motive is to gain profit off of a limited resource. It doesn't matter if the tickets cost even less than the concert costs to produce.

By the way, who determines the "actual worth" of tickets?

> That is not a libertarian fantasy or anything close to it

That is not what I was responding to.

The price people are willing to pay is who determines the actual worth of the ticket. Doesn't matter if its from the ticket booth or the scalper.Do people sell tickets for less than the concert costs to produce where you live? Thats a very flawed business model. Could it be instead that the pricing model for tickets doesn't adequately reflect what people are willing to pay?

If ticket booths charged exactly what scalpers charge would that change anything for you?

> The price people are willing to pay is who determines the actual worth of the ticket.

Indeed

> Do people sell tickets for less than the concert costs to produce where you live?

No, they don't, at it's not what I said.

> If ticket booths charged exactly what scalpers charge would that change anything for you?

Ni idea why you're asking me this question

Uhh what? So the price people are willing to pay dictates the worth, what exactly is your point here then? That scalpers are bad people because they make a profit?

So you extrapolate from one HN comment to all libertarians?

You are interpreting the original comment as uncharitably as possible.

"Additional Woodstocks" can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock" without changing the meaning of the comment.

Also, you don't need unlimited resources to create new concerts, and you don't need the "snap of a finger", you simply need people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive (as well as their love for music and live shows) incentivized through the price mechanism.

> So you extrapolate from one HN comment to all libertarians?

Yes. Because all of their notions of "one true free market" require unlimited resources and ability to immediately create anything from scratch.

> can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock"

Same thing, different attempt to argue semantics.

> Also, you don't need unlimited resources to create new concerts, and you don't need the "snap of a finger", you simply need people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive

I'll repeat this again for the fourth-fifth time in this thread. Literally thousands of concerts exist, "simply" driven by "people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive". And yet, Woodstock is Woodstock. And Sziget is Sziget etc. I wonder why.

The existence of the Ford fiesta model won't necessarily make a Lamborghini cheaper, but it does make the category "car" more affordable and provides an option for people on a budget.

The same applies to concerts.

Woodstock, due to various factors is able to charge a premium, but that doesn't mean you can't go to other concerts.

As more and more concerts are held, the premium that Woodstock can command is held in check, because people have other options.

> The same applies to concerts.

The analogy is incorrect when what was claimed was: "So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match"

> As more and more concerts are held, the premium that Woodstock can command is held in check, because people have other options.

- 6-day festival pass to Sziget is 315 EUR (~$346).

- Glastonbury (5 days) tickets are ~$365.

So, in check, according to you. And then...

- Coachella $449 and up

- Burning Man (which is not even a concert per se) is $525 and up (some tickets are sold at $2500)

And then...

- Justin Bieber can easily ask for 1000 dollars per ticket and more.

And so on.

Even though, according to you and @FeepingCreature, it's enough to just create another Sziget/Glastonbury/Coachella/Bieber for the prices to go down to an equilibrium.

Oh and there will be no scalpers.

Even though already, now, no one is stopping you from creating thousands of concerts.... and yet the price for those discussed doesn't go down, and scalpers exist.

Same for any sporting events etc.

> Scalping is only an issue if the sales price of products is artificially depressed.

No offense, but you do not understand art.

Yes, there are a lot of bands that could sell higher priced tickets but don't because they want to be accessable to everyone, not just people with money to burn.

If they sold higher priced tickets, more bands would have incentive to tour. This would make live music more accessible, not less.

Right now they're not accessible to everyone, they're accessible to rich people and a lottery of poor people.

How would higher priced tickets be more accessible to poor people?

Pricing is the way in which information about supply and demand is conveyed in a decentralized manner in a free market.

When prices of a good or service goes up, it incentivises other manufacturers or service providers to produce more of that good or service, which increases supply and puts downward pressure on prices.

So to answer your question, higher priced tickets increases supply, which causes lower priced tickets, which benefits poor people.

Eventually prices reach a level where supply and demand match and (for example) concerts are as cheap as they can be given their cost and the demand in the market for them (including the demand from poor people).

This EconTalk episode on price gouging during a natural disaster was very interesting, and somewhat related to this topic: https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-price-gouging/

There are literally thousands of concerts, and sporting events, and any other events that people buy tickets to.

Guess why people still go to Sziget or Woodstock.

Also guess why it's impossible to just click your fingers and pull an unlimited number of Woodstocks out of thin air.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

The fact that there is a limited number of Woodstocks is irrelevant.

There are other organizers and bands who can also offer concerts, and at a reduced price compared to the premium that something like Woodstock would demand. That's competition, and it puts downward pressure on concert prices in general, thereby helping people on a tight budget.

There are already thousands of concerts doing that. And yet Woodstock is still there with their prices.

Why do you think that is?

As I said, I do not think you understand art.

Hundreds of shitty ape pictures that anyone has access to view has not changed the price of entry to the Louvre.

You do not reduce the price for one form of art by having other artists available. They are all different, and people will want to see one and not another.

Blockchain solves none of this.

But Woodstock, or any other tickets are a limited resource by definition, the venue can cope with X amount of people there, where X is at max some area dependent value and can be limited further by safety measurements and/or law.

So your "proper market" criteria doesn't really exist for anything but digital or virtual goods.

Ah yes. The magical "click my fingers and there's a new Woodstock every time someone raises a price" free-market.

Crypto peddlers rarely have an idea of how the world works. When it comes to tickets, this always comes up with NFTs and it's amazing how little they know (or care).

I had this conversation not too long ago, see my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931

A bunch of people that probably haven’t bought a scalped ticket in their lives trying to explain how NFTs will revolutionise ticket sales is definitely peak crypto charlatan.

Tickets to a concert in the NFT world if you want so are a step back on what we had.

Back in my days, a Ticket was just a piece of paper. Without any name on it. The only information it had for what concert it was and what seat you had if there was the option. I could give it to anybody and he/she could go to the concert without any extra fee or a middleman.

> I currently only like NFTs as representations of digital licenses or tickets etc anyway, so simple hashes work for me.

But we don't need NFTs & Blorkchains for that. Just a simple digital signature is enough. Take all the info of the ticket, hash it, sign it with your private key, put the result into a Matrix Code for convenience and done.

How do you avoid anyone else putting CP on a blockchain because they can. And so a node runner always has this problem regardless of what say OpenSea does for example.

Sounds like an immutable global record isn’t such a panacea after all…

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