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The thing that makes ticketing difficult is not minting and selling unique items of inventory - that's a well understood problem with many viable solutions. Nor
by calciphus 6y ago
The thing that makes ticketing difficult is not minting and selling unique items of inventory - that's a well understood problem with many viable solutions. Nor is verifying at any given moment if a single piece of inventory is valid and who owns it - again, that's a solved problem.
The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's an excess of demand and entities who can exploit access, speed, or technical know-how for arbitrage. Blockchain ticketing companies don't fundamentally change that statement - they enable it.
No one likes Ticketmaster - but to call them a 3rd party service that takes a massive cut is inaccurate. Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which usually owns both the venue and the artist's tour schedule. And owns the primary and secondary ticketing sales. So Ticketmaster is usually the first, second, and third-party in ticketing.
Blockchain doesn't magically fix this. It doesn't change the deep relationship Live Nation has with labels and artists, their fodness for excluding artists who play at rival and independent venues, their habit of defining contract requirements that can only be fulfilled by Ticketmaster software...
Blockchain is solving all of the wrong problems in ticketing. I don't need a distributed, trustless ledger of who owns a ticket when all of them are issued by and redeemed at the same location. The only real reason to push for blockchain in ticketing is to help scalpers hide what they're doing.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's an excess of demand I don't buy "excess of demand" as being fundamental, though, except in the most technical sense. Imagine a super niche event, where the organizers know there are exactly 200 fans on the entire planet, and they offer that many tickets on sale. It still makes sense for a random scalper to take a loan, buy all 200 tickets, and resell them with a markup. It would still make sense if the organizers offered 300 tickets, i.e. greater supply than demand in terms of heacount! A scalper could still come ahead buying all 300, selling 200 at a high enough markup, and feed the remaining 100 tickets to a cat. I think scalping (arbitrage) can occur in any situation in which the supplier isn't charging the maximum the market can bear (perhaps that's what is meant by "excess of demand" and I'm missing some technical definitions here).
- lottin 6y agoExcess demand refers to a situation where a good is underpriced, resulting in a quantity demanded that exceeds the supply. [0] [0] http://www.personal.psu.edu/dxl31/econ2/pizza_market.png http://www.personal.psu.edu/dxl31/econ2/pizza_market.png