Using NFTs for generating concert tickets or supply chain logistics & tracking seems like it could be economically viable. I'd bet the biggest use case for NFTs at present is money laundering. It's hard to imagine someone having the talent to acquire $800,000 yet still being gullible enough to spend it all on a hyperlink of a hand drawn monkey with the expectation that they bought an appreciable asset.
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The whole point of NFTs is that they are decentralised. If you are going to a concert, you are by definition centralizing power in the hands of the organizer, making NFTs entirely pointless for this. You might as well have the concert organizer send out emails with ticket numbers.
Supply chain I am not even sure why you would want it. NFTs don't prevent false data being input into the system. it only "protects" against falsification after the entry is made, which email does as well.
> Seems like it would be economically viable
why?
Except in your concert example, the number of tickets is not verifiably public with a centralised entity. There is nothing that stops the organizer from printing more tickets than there exists capacity for. On the flip side, a NFT ticket can be demonstratably unique (no counterfeiting or luck of the draw from scalpers), and only a certain number can be printed (otherwise everyone will know that the organizer is not acting legitimately).
As digital entities, a door is also opened for various interactive / programatic ways of using said tickets that are not possible with a private database and lack of incentive to improve the status quo (Most of the established incumbents have had years to improve, but don't until threatened by an emerging technology).
Another example off the top of my head:
* An anti-scalper lottery where a portion of the tickets are reserved for accounts that have owned a previous ticket for an event in the last twelve months during the run-time of said event. Let's say 80% of the ticket pool, and the remaining 20% is the free-for-all and any unsold tickets are sold free-for-all as well for the last week before the event starts.
> There is nothing that stops the organizer from printing more tickets than there exists capacity for.
That's not a real problem.
Really? You've never booked a ticket on a flight and your seat had been sold to someone else? The same thing happens at some concerts too.
Again, none of this matters because the whole thing is ultimately centralized in the hands of the organizer. Nothing stops him from printing 100 tickets on VET, and then turning around and printing 10000 tickets normally.
> otherwise everyone will know that the organizer is not acting legitimately
Because this has clearly stopped serial rugpullers like Jake Paul. People no longer invest in the NFT projects that he shills right?
And also there is nothing wrong with overbooking, because at least a few people are going to no-show. If the organizer is not able to accommodate you, you are given a refund.
This anti scalping tech is not even related to crypto currency. It can be implemented even more easily in a normal ticketing system with KYC. The fact that people don't do it is proof that it is easily defeated. With non KYC crypto accounts, the accounts themselves could be traded, making any account based tech pointless.
Finally, most of this is so niche that I have doubts that even if all this was true, it still wouldn't result in something successful.
Doesn't make much sense for concert tickets, unless you want to enable scalping. The lifetime of a ticket is short.
There are people starting to use NFTs for tickets precisely to circumvent scalpers and allow a legitimate secondary market to exist in which the primary artist benefits from resales. There are real reasons for a secondary market to exist (eg you've got concert tickets and suddenly get sick and can't go or something) the problem right now is that the existing secondary market is broken so prices are insane for the real fans and the artist themselves don't see any of the revenue.
Additionally, with NFT tickets you can add utility to them after the event. "You went to my concert, now you can get into a special channel on my discord/get early access to my album etc". These are things which are easy to do with NFTs that are operationally complex or expensive to do with conventional tickets.
> You went to my concert, now you can get into a special channel on my discord/get early access to my album etc
This is one of those use cases which sounds super cool but when you think about it, doesn’t really make any sense. I mean, maybe I’m just an antisocial person, but why would I want to be put in essentially a group chat for every person attending the Screaming Monkeys Band Tampa 11/23 concert? Early access for an album? You mean, the album you already presumably just heard… at the concert?
Lots of people really like this - you're in a fan community where it's ok to be a fan and people aren't going to criticise the fact you like this particular band. The artist can do AMAs direct with their fans without the trolling etc that infect a lot of social media because everyone in that channel is in the same community.
As for buying an album you heard at the concert, yes. If you like what you heard at the concert, why wouldn't you want to hear it again? People listen to music more than once per tune.
You may not see these things as a benefit but a lot of people do.
You reduced my argument to stupidity by removing the early access part. You said early access to an album, meaning because you bought X token-ticket, you get access to an album which is not released yet, or else it wouldn’t be early access. Of course if the album is already out, then yeah most people at the concert are going to have had bought already. But then you don’t need early access via token-ticket.
Unless you are meaning that the artist performed a new album at this concert, now I get to buy it ahead of its actual release because I attended a concert. This makes more sense logically and is probably what you meant, but it seems like a very specific and even one-off use case. Not to mention that, due to torrents, once this “early access” album is unlocked with a token, it’s practically going to be unlocked for everyone because other people aren’t going to wait and at least one of those token-ticket holders is going to seed it.
> you're in a fan community where it's ok to be a fan and people aren't going to criticise the fact you like this particular band
I suppose this is similar to a forum but membership is gated via purchase of a token-ticket. It’s an interesting use case for sure, but in my opinion is unnecessarily financialized because now I have to buy a ticket to the artist to join a forum/subreddit?
This doesn’t even solve the fact that if the artist doesn’t offer concerts in your area or even country (eg South America), it doesn’t really matter that you have all of this decentralized and distributed technology gating things up because the actual point of centralization, the artist, isn’t touring where you live.
“No not all forums, this would just be an extra VIP forum.”
I guess, sure, this is a technology which enables a VIP forum. I am not sure how useful, popular, appreciated, etc. those are, not to mention the fact that you can already implement that without tokens by requiring unique ticket serial numbers and then you don’t have the problem of everyone’s membership to this VIP forum being public knowledge (as is the nature of the blockchain), but fair enough.
Email is more operationally complex that setting up an NFT? Fan buys ticket, fan gets an email with a link to "members only club" Discord, fan goes on with their life.
None of this requires blockchains or NFTs. And all of these "use cases" have been done successfully for literally thousands of years.
How do NFTs circumvent scalpers? Scalpers can still buy the supply of tickets and just sell the private keys directly entirely bypassing any resale fee. And before you say people wouldn't buy private keys because of the risk of the seller giving it to multiple people: that's the same as the current situation.
If you want to resell an NFT with a contract that takes a cut on transfers, you can wrap the NFT in another NFT that owns the original. Now you've created a tradeable derivative. Ownership is verifiable, and the derivative is tradeable without a cut to the original creator. The owner of the derivative can, if they want, unwrap the item and get back the original NFT. This is like taking physical delivery of a commodity.
NFT wrapping as a service already exists.[1][2] In beta.
I know several who found out at the ticket gate of the college fb national championship that they had purchased counterfeit tickets @ $800 a pop, NFTs might be able to offer increased protection against that sort of thing.
How? You just told a story about the system working without NFTs.
Your acquaintances could still be phished, scammed, funneled, whatever, into buying fake tickets and the takers at the gate would still refuse them.