[andrewla]

Decades upon decades of holograms and watermarks on tickets to make them unforgeable. But it keeps getting easier to forge them. Meanwhile ticket prices keep increasing (venue space is one of the last things that's truly scarce) and the incentives for forgery keep increasing.

Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?

[hapless]

Go ahead and require a special gadget to get an "electronically transferrable ticket," no skin off my back. That is a feature I will never use.

Don't bother your season ticket holders about getting their own person admitted! I am standing in front of you, bearing identification, and you are whining about a mobile app?

[DerArzt]

At this point couldn't we have all tickets be printed with a QR code that is used to look up if it's a valid ticket or not (if you have the QR code you have the ticket)? I don't get why forgary would be a thing if the ticket ID's were GUIDs or something else that you can't brute force while physically in line at the event.

The real reason, I fear, that we need the apps is data harvesting to be sold to data brokers.

[andrewla]

Forgery here would be stealing someone else's ticket code for resale, or selling the same ticket multiple times.

[trollbridge]

If ticket prices keep increasing, it would seem the capability to print harder-to-forge tickets could be done with the extra revenue.

They could even do something like give him a little RFID token that can be used once. Tap it, gates open, go in, done.