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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

FIFA invented ticket options (they call it RTBs), a ticket derivatives market (their marketplace allowing trades and sales of RTBs), and then cross-bred that with loot boxes (random cheap “cards” that may or may not contain RTBs). I bet that with some effort, you could figure out how to short tickets given the tools they have created.

We finally found a worthy competitor to Ticketmaster in the “worst way to buy tickets to an event” competition, it seems.

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You know, now that I think about it, I have seen an actual ticket short squeeze before - when the airline is overbooked and has to run a reverse auction to buy back their ticket.

So if FIFA oversells a game (which i would not put past them), we could have that here too. HA!

Counterpoint: Such a market *technically* already existed outside of FIFA, just that it was a more underground/grey/black market.

Strictly speaking, an external market being brought into existing ticketing systems would be net-neutral, since the following pros & cons should balance each other out:

(additional visibility into ticket prices & demand (+)) + (increased assurance of "this is the one place to get a ticket" (+))

-( (increased competition for a ticket (-)) + (perverse incentives of platform to increase ticket prices (-)) )

But because of their reputation, the negatives are weighed more than the positives due to their existing track record.

As such, the following constructed scenario should be considered: If it was a fully automated platform external to any party that handled such ticketing systems, would such a severely negative view still hold?

They saw how much sports betting platforms and crypto exchanges were making offering parlays and leverage, and wanted in on the action. Soon you'll be able to buy a 60X leveraged perpetual option to speculate on game ticket prices.

If you can sell a call option you can construct a portfolio that's effectively short tickets

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