Non Fungible Tickets | Hacker News Reader

Non Fungible Tickets

dx.tips

31 pointsswyx23 comments

This is a great example of taking a concept that originated in cryptocurrency and removing the cryptocurrency part.

There's no need to make a ticket transferrable and tracked with a decentralized ledger... but the uniqueness+art aspect is still pretty neat.

How else would you make a digital ticket transferable (on 3rd-party marketplaces) and verifiably authentic? Honest question. It's probably possible.

The problem today is that if I buy a 2nd-hand a concert ticket on <literally any marketplace>, I might be getting screwed with a counterfeit ticket (as far as I know).

Do they actually want easy, transparent, not Grey market digital ticket secondary markets? Sounds like a heaven for scalpers and speed purchase botting.

Is the "3rd-party marketplace" bit a hard requirement? If I'm organising an event and I am ok with tickets being transferred, would it satisfy requirements if I offered a mechanism for transfers myself?

Disagree on the no need to make a ticket transferable part - this is the place where NFTs make the most sense - there really is only 1 seat 22B at the Lakers game next Saturday, but in an untrustworthy secondary market I want to know that what I’m buying is (a) legit and (b) the only version in existence.

In practice, most conferences don't want to allow transferable tickets because it ends up with a scalper situation.

The scalper will annoy everyone and take any money that would otherwise go to conference.

Secondary market for tickets is very small.

Stubhub disagrees.

And venues would love scalper if they got a cut.

I helped build this system for a major ticketing company. We used a database, that was it - because its pretty simple overall when you're taking a cut. Confirm original barcode, mark transaction, issue a new barcode.

At performance time only the new barcodes work, and if you didn't get it through the ticketing company then you were just out of luck.

As with all things that scalpers re-sell which are not necessary for survival and health I find myself unable to come to a reasonable answer for why the first sale shouldn't be at market price.

Complete speculation, but I would guess that in many cases the company/organisation running the conference would want lots of people to come (e.g. for marketing or hiring purposes), even if they could increase total ticket revenue by raising prices.

Selling expensive tickets is also bad PR, which might be worth more to the organisers than the extra ticket revenue.

I've always figured you could just do an auction.

Say you have 500 tickets. You give everyone who wants to go 48 hours to submit how much they're willing to pay for a ticket. At the end of the time period the 500 people whose bids were the highest all get the tickets.

You could publish the current price of the tickets during the bidding time frame and allow people to modify their bids at any point.

The final price would be whatever the 500th lowest bid was. In the event of a tie, choose randomly among the people tied for 500th.

I imagine this would be greeted with complaints about how it gives the rich an advantage, but I can't think of a fairer way to distribute tickets that also avoids the scalper problem.

Cultural events should not be the exclusive domain of the wealthy. The free market is not God. Rubbing more capitalism into a problem makes that problem worse, not better.

https://pitchfork.com/news/ticketmaster-hit-with-class-actio...

> In practice, most conferences don't want to allow transferable tickets because it ends up with a scalper situation.

In practice, whether or not scalpers exist is of very little relevance to most conferences, because...

> The scalper will annoy everyone and take any money that would otherwise go to conference.

...that money wasn't going to go to the conference anyway, because the conference is charging less than the market price (i.e. what the scalper is able to get away with charging). That money would go to the conference if the conference did charge the market price... and then the scalpers wouldn't have any margins left and therefore would have no reason to be scalpers anyway.

As for "annoy everyone", in practice that's also of very little relevance once the conference actually has your money. The only people it'd annoy are the ones trying to buy tickets, and it'd only be particularly annoying if scalpers were the only option - i.e. if the conference was already sold out, and therefore had already taken as much money as it possibly could.

----

The more reasonable answer for why conferences don't want transferable tickets is because they often tie tickets to attendees' identities (e.g. photo ID) and that connection becomes impractical unless the conference is actively involved in the transfer process. The reasons for that are partially addressed through NFTs (namely: wanting to ensure that it's an authentic ticket that actually belongs to you), but also partially not addressed (namely: security, especially if you have particularly-high-profile speakers and/or attendees).

Many artists specifically don't charge "market value" (ie, the most they possibly can) for tickets, because they want their fans to be able to attend the event; not just the wealthy ones. Scalpers buying out the tickets and reselling them higher defeats the point of this.

> This is a great example of taking a concept that originated in cryptocurrency

What concept are you talking about? Venue tickets have been a thing for a while.

I believe the concept referenced is the one mentioned in the second paragraph: uniqueness+art.

Like a painting?

... within the context of ticketing.

"Contrast this to the usual signup flow of other conferences, where you have to provide enough info to get Pentagon clearance”

Brilliant piece Swyx!!!

haha i have some personal complaints about some forms i have to fill out...

thanks Steven

I feel you on that lol!!

I was hoping this would be about using NFTs to improve on TicketMaster/StubHub hell.

I haven't followed it in a long time, but some of the Monero developers were working on Tari, which is basically a private NFT if my understanding is correct.

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