Ticketing | Hacker News Reader

Ticketing

avc.com

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I have a partial season ticket package with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs use a system called FlashSeats, which is conveniently owned by the Cavs' majority owner, Dan Gilbert. All of my tickets get automatically added to Flash Seats and I can sell or transfer my tickets on the Flash Seats marketplace or buy additional seats on it. When selling my seats, I set a "buy it now"-type price where people can instantly buy them or people can "bid" on seats and I can either accept or reject those bids. If the seats get sold, the transfer is done automatically.

At the gate, I use the Flash Seats app on my phone as my ticket. You can also hook up your account to your driver's licence or credit card and use that as verification at the gate.

The good deal for the Cavs is that they own their secondary ticket market and can profit from the fees charged by Flash Seats. For ticket buyers, it's so-so. I can't sell my tickets on eBay or StubHub, but people generally understand that if you want to buy Cavs tickets, you have to buy them on FlashSeats (the entire season is essentially sold out), so there is plenty of action in the marketplace.

My biggest gripes with FlashSeats arethat that iPhone app is pretty terrible for selling tickets and that the website app is horribly dated and the UI for buying tickets sucks, which probably reduces my ability to sell tickets by some amount. Stubhub has a better UI by leaps and bounds. FlashSeats reminds me of what web apps looked like in 2003 or so and there is no "arena view" or easy way to tell within the app where the seats are actually located. Since the Cavs' arena, Quicken Loans Arena, has an excellent seat viewer on their website, I can't believe the two aren't integrated in to make the buying experience better.

As a total aside and anecdote, I used to buy and sell concert tickets, mostly summer Jimmy Buffett concerts, when I was in college is the early 2000's. I would buy on Ticketmaster and sell on eBay. Back then, I could get really strong average margins on my ticket resales. In my casual observations, it seems like better ticket marketplaces like StubHub have reduced the premium you used to be able to get flipping tickets.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't the Cavs threatened to revoke your tickets if they catch you selling on a different site?

Also, hello fellow Clevelander :)

I haven't tried selling elsewhere but I've heard of people doing it. The last time I tried selling Cavs tickets somewhere else was when you could still get them as paper tickets from Ticketmaster.

Since transfers on FlashSeats are free, you could sell them somewhere else and just do the exchange on FlashSeats. I'd imagine you're right in the Cavs taking issue with doing that. Teams are running their own secondary markets to capture the extra revenue that was going to places like StubHub. I will say that having an official secondary market is nice, I just think the FlashSeats experience is lacking.

Glad to see another Northeast Ohioan on here!

Lots of "great" stuff in this post.

1) Problem only rich people have (sharing Nets season tickets)

2) Talking his own book (slavish praise of the Coinbase mobile app; Coinbase is a portfolio company)

3) Mentioning irrelevant Bitcoin features (tracking ownership of the tickets is the least difficult problem he presented and could be done trivially on a centralized server rather than using computationally inefficient colored-coin techniques)

My takeaway from this and about 1/2 of AVC's recent posts is that he is long Bitcoin to the gills and wishes everyone else saw value in Bitcoin like he does.

FWIW, I like cryptocurrencies and believe in their utility, but I don't like Bitcoin. There's just too much mystery around its genesis. Will the real Satoshi please stand up?

What does Bitcoin's genesis have to do with its value, usability, or why you dislike it?

In short, it hurts the product's transparency. Users don't really understand who gains and loses by its adoption. Gold bugs hoard gold because they don't trust the government. Maybe I'd be a dollar bug and hoard dollars because I don't trust Satoshi (or trust him less than the Fed). But I can't even figure out if I don't trust Satoshi or not because nobody knows who he is and what his/her/their long/short term intentions with the alleged $100M bitcoins Satoshi controls.

You're not trusting Satoshi, you're trusting the blockchain. Everything is open source. Satoshi is no longer associated with Bitcoin.

Well, that's just it. I trust the blockchain (and other open source methods), but not Satoshi. i.e. when it becomes easier to use cryptocurrencies, I'll use dogecoin, litecoin, or something else.
However, right now, they just seem too hard to use. And solutions that are easy to use, like non-bank banks such as Mt Gox, well you know how that turned out.

and I used to trust bash and openssl

No one cares if he will make $100M from this or not. $100M is less than %10 of the total value of all the bitcoins currently in the market and we can just think of that %10 as the one-time tax "humanity" paid to get the bitcoin system developed.

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