Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by exdsq 1639 days ago
> Everything you have listed here would be much much easier in a database.

No, it isn't. How would you buy a ticket from me online when you don't know me? The only real option is to use stubhub which requires us to both create accounts, put our credit cards in, verify ourselves, you put the ticket up, me to buy it, and for me to not know the ticket is A. not been purchased by someone else B. authentic.

A decentralised app that runs this requires a smart contract to mint tickets and a smart contract to wrap reselling them, plus a web UI to tie it all together. An open source developer could build this and charge $1 per tx to maintain it.

What's the centralised alternative?

1 comments

Band sells tickets via platform A. I buy ticket, I no longer want ticket, I sell it back to platform A which makes it available to you to purchase. They can also have a feature which allows specific person to person transfers if I want to give it to a friend.

This is all technologically possible. The reason platforms usually do not let you do this is due to business requirements. Why would the business switch to a platform that strips their ability to control resale if it isn't something they want to begin with? If they do want resale, its trivially possible with existing boring tech.

Woah, who mentioned I wanted businesses to introduce these features? Of course it makes no sense to them. I’m saying we can get rid of them altogether as the majority of their work can be replicated.

Up until now it’s been difficult to do this because the prohibitive cost of centralized services - with Web3 you have all these building blocks available without a high cost central party managing databases, cloud costs, staffing, etc…

Edit: To clarify I’ve seen end users and bands want resale, it’s just not very profitable and hard to control fraud.

To summarize I’m saying that I think and hope that Web3 will have these businesses purpose as features of the infrastructure :)

There is nothing prohibitively expensive about running such a database. If you can't resell or transfer your ticket right now, its because the seller does not want you to resell it.

Crypto posts always take every problem as a technical problem without understanding that there are very few technical problems but intentional business restrictions. Those businesses have no incentives to move to a platform which takes this power out of their hands.

There is nothing stopping ticket sellers from allowing refunds on tickets which put the tickets back in to the available pool to buy again.