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You've run into a person here who has confused "a blockchain would fix this" with "better systems, standards and openness would fix this, the exact implementati

by Nursie 4y ago

You've run into a person here who has confused "a blockchain would fix this" with "better systems, standards and openness would fix this, the exact implementation doesn't matter so much". I ran into one last week talking about concert tickets. Apparently we could fix the problems of ticketmaster dominance by using a blockchain. When I proposed that an API+DB system would do the job just as well, and we have an authority in the picture already (the venue operator) so distributed trust was overkill, I was told "good luck getting ticketmaster to use your API system". Because apparently the data-structure and trust model now dictate how the market works, and if we just chant "blockchain" loud enough, that'll magically fix monopoly issues. It's very weird thinking. I mean, sure, if we force ticket issuing, or the land registry or whatever onto a public blockchain solution, that would address some of the issues. But the improvement comes from the forcing, not the specific tech...

prepend 4y ago
I’d love to see Tickmaster’s blockchain+NFT system for how horrible and anti-user it would be. I agree with both points. For a while it seemed like small venues were using indie $1 ticket processing services that would basically just generate a QR code and keep everything cheap. But those seem to be going away as Ticketmaster just takes over and turns a $1 transaction into a $20 transaction. If venues just used Shopify then they’d have their db+api solution. But I think vendors like being able to 1) reduce their work, 2) blame Ticketmaster for all fees, and 3) make more money. For the same reason vendors don’t use api+db, I don’t see them using a blockchain. Another reason is that blockchains are forever and I don’t see the value in a huge blockchain with mostly garbage data of tickets sold 50 years ago. This seems like a really unnecessary expense for something simple like temporal transactions that are meaningless after the event. An api+db can be flushed out so the storage costs are very low.

by Nursie 4y ago

prepend 4y ago

I’d love to see Tickmaster’s blockchain+NFT system for how horrible and anti-user it would be. I agree with both points. For a while it seemed like small venues were using indie $1 ticket processing services that would basically just generate a QR code and keep everything cheap. But those seem to be going away as Ticketmaster just takes over and turns a $1 transaction into a $20 transaction. If venues just used Shopify then they’d have their db+api solution. But I think vendors like being able to 1) reduce their work, 2) blame Ticketmaster for all fees, and 3) make more money. For the same reason vendors don’t use api+db, I don’t see them using a blockchain. Another reason is that blockchains are forever and I don’t see the value in a huge blockchain with mostly garbage data of tickets sold 50 years ago. This seems like a really unnecessary expense for something simple like temporal transactions that are meaningless after the event. An api+db can be flushed out so the storage costs are very low.