Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT
CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoNot the person you’re talking to, but it seems like a stretch that some little nightclub will want to build and maintain their own smart contract infrastructure. It’s not just issuing the tickets, it’s also building and distributing the tools to quickly validate the hundreds/thousands of attendees every night.
For example, it’s not enough just to validate that everyone at the gate has an NFT. I could enter the venue with a valid token, and then transfer it to my friend still outside once I’m through the door. So now the bouncer needs to track what tickets have already been scanned, and you probably want it to update off-chain (faster and no gas fees).
Not that I can pretend to know what already goes in to a venue supporting TicketMaster, but I figure there’s got to be a reason why these middlemen were wanted in the first place. That reason is probably about venues wanting to do music and not tech support.
Klox@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ack. I’m not going to pretend like I’ve thought up the whole business plan, but it’s well known the centralized ticket agencies have huge markups. Ticketmaster’s ticketing business is something like $3B in revenue with $1B in profit.
I’m sure there’s still a need venue services, I didn’t mean to suggest the Venue can be entirely in-house. Maybe I’m minimizing that part of their business, but if tickets are NFTs it’s extemelry easy to avoid vendor lock-in for expensive scanners and day-of services.
A database indexing scanned tickets is cheap if you don’t want to burn/transfer the NFT at the door (depends on the network costs too). But again I think that’s the cheap part of what these ticket business do.
dtaylor84@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
But Blockchain/NFTs solve the easy part of the problem that is already sufficiently solved with a database. Now you’re suggesting using NFTs and a database? Why bother.
Klox@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
What is your background in IT? I briefly explained that a database is not “just” a database when it comes to building a marketplace/exchange, there is a ton of infrastructure and code. The problem is that it is all proprietary and not following any kind of open standard. In comparison, the database schema for “checking in” to an event is dead simple: (ticket id, checked in). You could literally print off paper and do it analog if you wanted, it’s that simple. If you tell me your background maybe I can make a more specific analogy, but the infrastructure + code + database schema for a marketplace is like the difference between a golf cart and an F1 car. Or a grocery checklist and a novel. These are many orders of complexity different.
Why bother? Because it sucks paying fees. Literally billions of dollars extracted by middleware companies. Every stupid ass website is charging fees for everything because it’s all centralized crap. My wife wanted to go to a popular musical, and for 5 tickets I’m paying literally an extra ticket worth in “convenience fees”. I bought a paid for a couple more tickets for my siblings to join, and they bailed. I posted them on StubHub and one sold for less than value, and the other didn’t. The “general problem” of ticketing infrastructure - generating, marketplace, trading - has been solved with an NFT open standard at a fraction of the cost in comparison to what these parasitic companies are extracting. Why bother? Because I’m tired of our fees culture.
dtaylor84@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
You can replace the middlemen without involving Blockchain.
I am not saying the problem doesn’t exist, I’m saying Blockchain is overly complicated, inflexible and superfluous.
Whatever solution you design with Blockchain, I can redesign without Blockchain without losing anything – and gaining simplicity.