If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?

All potential solutions to that question have one thing in common: An event has by definition a centralized entity, which is the organizer. Everything that a blockchain supposedly solves in event ticketing is after all a solution due to digitization, not decentralization.

I don't like NFT too but have some knowledge about it.

> If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?

This is actually not a problem at all:

  - It's not likely you'd buy ticket for some event that you don't know/not interested.
  - The event official (which you already know) should publish these info for query:
    - The blockchain  
    - The contract address  
    - The NFT token ID

If you bought a proclaimed ticket NFT but it's fake, the only possibility is the official that you trust is a fraud.

Ok, so I‘ll have to check with the event official.

How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you. Are you aware of who actually organizes that event and is in charge? Ticket buyers most often don‘t know and don‘t care.

Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?

Hey, no matter how you buy a ticket, it'd have to be verified by the official eventually.

> How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you.

Interesting, so you are saying either:

  - Beyoncé official publish nothing about the event
  - We have no way to look up the ticket info

Not likely IMO especially if we are talking stars like Beyoncé.

> Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?

Well, de-centralization is nothing about convenience, and it's not just about ticket-selling.

I totally agree that blockchain & web3 is not mature at all comparing to how it is now, and I don't think it's going to be success unless they find a way to generally interact with real-world technically and legally.

The nice thing of selling on concert tickets on a public block chain is that it's public, so those tickets can be invalidated easily. Everybody hates ticket resellers.

Reputation of the provenance and authenticity of goods is an entirely different problem.

Sure! The tricky bit here, in my mind is:

1. How do you know the ticket is valid?

2a. How do you know I send the ticket after you pay me?

2b. How do I know you send the money after I send the ticket?

3. How do you know I don't send the ticket to someone else too, if it's digital?

A ticket is valid if and only if it gets you into the concert. You can ask the concert organizers to validate tickets for you. Most concert organizers have concentrated on two sites that allow them to validate tickets. That is why Ticketmaster is valuable, despite its terrible reputation.

A cryptographically signed I owe you is and will always be meaningless. What is meaningful is the signature at the end of the chain, when the concert organizer lets you in.

In person with cash or stubhub.

Stubhub has a 10% fee for the buyer and a 15% fee for the seller. It also can’t guarantee tickets are valid, they do guarantee a refund to the buyer if they’re false though. This is more expensive and less safe than an NFT ticket.

And what makes you think that ticket sellers would implement such a system? The pure goodness of their hearts?

(My understanding is that NFTs can be constructed to charge a fee on transfers. At least, this is what I've been told by people trying to promote their use for artwork...)

This would require a smart contract, a react front-end to make the UX a little nicer, and a little maintenance. If I charge $1 fees per ticket tx I'd undercut the market and it wouldn't be that hard.

Do you think Ticketmaster charges so much because their copy of MySQL runs on crushed Ming vases?

They charge as much as they do because they have removed a lot of competition from the market (see e.g. jwz - https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html). There’s no reason why they would implement an NFT where they’d get less money — in fact, they’re the kind of unethical weasels who’d figure out as many ways to hide fees in the smart contracts and play games with the blockchain they use to maximize their take.

This is the whole point of Web3. The idea that these centralized services can be replaced by peer-to-peer transactions over open source software and the digitization of assets like gig tickets as NFTs.

Yes, and it shows why that vision is a pipe dream: Ticketmaster isn’t centralized by accident, or because there haven’t been hundreds of attempts to build competing services. They’re centralized because they spent many millions of dollars centralizing that market and related ones so they can extract as much money as possible.

Blockchains not only don’t change that, they encourage it by so heavily favoring the richest participants. There’s no way an unethical incumbent would use that as you hope rather than how they’ve used everything else, and without access to the venues and artists in their network you’re going to be limited to the smallest places and bands.

EDIT: remember, everyone not getting paid by them hates Ticketmaster. Their website has been terrible since the 90s and their random fees have been the subject of rants and jokes for just as long. There have been several generations of developers who thought tickets shouldn’t cost so much, knew their musician friends hated Ticketmaster, and said “hey I know Perl/PHP/Python/Node/etc. and could build a better website!” They all failed, and it would be really critical to ask what you’re bringing which is different and especially whether this is actually a technical problem or you have power to apply leverage to the business problems.

Cui bono? Who benefits? Who makes money from that? No one who runs the infrastructure? Why would they build it?

Did anyone actually implement any blockchain-based ticketing? Why do you think the fee collected by a company doing that would be lower than StubHub?

Importantly, wouldn't those tokens be... fungible...?

What do you think the transaction cost is in Ethereum for your NFT ticket? Cause from what I'm seeing right now, it's equal to the cost of your fancy concert ticket. 2 sales (one to the scalper, one to the sucker) means you've just paid 300% of the cost before the middleman even got paid.

Literally around 2 cents if you use the Polygon network. Layer 2 solutions would be perfect for this because A. you can bundle ticket sales and B. you don't need tickets to sell immediately, it's okay to wait a couple minutes.

> 10% fee for the buyer and a 15% fee

What are the gas fees and how do they compare to the average concert ticket?

Very fair question! On Ethereum the fee would be stupid high. However Polygon has fees of around $0.02 so say I'm looking to make myself a bit of a profit for making the UX nicer with a website we'd be looking at around $1 fees.

I keep using this example in NFT arguments but no one has actually done it yet. Screw it, I’m going to launch this and prove it works (or admit my defeat lol). Time to open vscode.

Now imagine that any industry can easily do the same thing stubhub did without reinventing the wheel every time.

my story: I was in Barcelona, wanted to go to Primavera Sound to see Pavement, went outside the gates, met a guy who was selling his ticket, gave him the money and

BOOM!

5 minutes later I was under the stage.