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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

Typically "use case" means not just something a technology can do, but something it's better at than the common alternatives, in some way that matters. Not so with blockchain and financial transactions. Everything it treats like a bug is in fact a valuable, critical feature (i.e. reversibility and tracking). So if grandpa overcomes his tropey Luddite ways and goes from cash to card, he's arrived at the best technology for financial transactions we have, and need go no further.

Crypto's only true significant/impactful use case in finance is money laundering and facilitation of other types of crime.

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People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience.

Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an event) can be represented with NFTs. Fungible tickets (ie no assigned seats, maybe access to any event within a period) can be simply tokenized.

That isn't a use case that exists now, and because of the toxic association that the term "NFT" has, it probably won't exist. It's a shame though, because the technology exists, and works better than existing options.

Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs?

I have bought assigned seat tickets online direct from venues without TM nor NFTs, worked fine.

I have also bought tickets to exhibitions (no seats nor assigned time) direct from venues online without TM nor NFTs, worked fine.

Seems that the only problem is TM and you won't make them go way with NFTs.

> Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs?

There is no fundamental difference if you swap the TM brand for another. By using an NFT-based solution, the middleman can be cut out entirely, while maintaining feature parity, and without introducing extra burden on venues. An OTS Free Software application can expose the same functionality to venues without needing to maintain any infrastructure, and without dealing with TM.

Sure, Ticketmaster sucks. But just to give one example, 11 years after Tim Berners Lee invented the web, Ticketmaster was selling tickets to the 2004 Olympic Games online: https://web.archive.org/web/20040206011648/http://www.ticket...

The Bitcoin paper was published in 2008. It’s been almost 15 years now - plus all of the advantages that you have with modern development practices that were unavailable in the early 2000s - and yet still nobody uses blockchain at scale for this use case.

If this worked better than existing options at a lower cost, then businesses would be rushing to adopt it.

What competition did Ticketmaster have in the digital ticket market at that time? What competition does a nameless digital ticketing company in the modern day have at this time?

The reasons for NFTs not being used for this use-case are way more nuanced then "it should have found success in the exact same number of years as selling tickets on the web".

> Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM.

And venues could do that (they’re not limited to selling tickets via Ticketmaster), but then they have to maintain technical and operational expertise which is a distraction.

And there could be an OTS Free Software solution with far less operating costs than TM.

> And there could be an OTS Free Software solution with far less operating costs than TM.

Sounds like you've spotted a business opportunity!

Things like ticket master exist to solve the problem of every venue having to take care of ticket sales as well. This is again a feature out of touch people treat as a bug to fix.

That's exactly what an NFT-based ticket system would do also.

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