
Aventus: A blockchain-based touting and counterfeit solution for event ticketing - _aventus
https://medium.com/@aventus/aventus-a-touting-and-counterfeit-solution-for-the-event-ticketing-industry-74c40fa79846
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nickpsecurity
It seems like most of what I read in first half could be done with an app for
seller, an app for buyer, a traditional database, and regular currency.
There's already ticketing software in existence that people actually use.
Improving it in ways described in article without blockchains should get more
take up. Even logging for verification, popular with blockchains, can be done
with a signed, hash chain + 3rd-party, trusted timestamping.

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_aventus
Hi Nick, thanks for your reply. Our point here is to completely eliminate
trust. There is a lot of shady behaviour in the current ticketing industry -
for example at initial releases of tickets, under the table deals between
promoters and ticket resale platforms exist where promoters give these
platforms a percentage of the initial release to put directly on the secondary
market, in exchange for percentage commissions on each of those tickets sold.

To solve this, yes theoretically you could have a trusted third-party
intermediating, but who would that third party be? If this were a product
created by a monopoly with 80% market share, could you completely trust that
the third party selected to intermediate were completely independent,
especially when they are dis-incentivised from finding an unbiased third party
that they could not influence?

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nickpsecurity
"To solve this, yes theoretically you could have a trusted third-party
intermediating, but who would that third party be?"

A non-profit to start with given a startup is focused on money and growth.
They almost always get more evil or acquired into evil over time. The
nonprofit is chartered and/or contracted with standard provisions to prohibit
certain behavior. They have a traditional crypto + database + published ticket
log w/ optional apps as I described.

Whoever is running it registers the event, they describe the constraints such
as ticket numbers/pricing, that summary is posted by ticket mediator for all
to see, each purchase generates a unique ticket in the database signed by
central app, buyer's app plus mediator's web site shows decrease in tickets
available, a log optionally shows a ticket ID (maybe hash) added for each
ticket purchased, optionally saved onto append/write-only storage (DVD-R's)
for certain amount of time, and any claim in court can pull the data to check
payment records vs buyer's income on event vs database contents vs published
log. All of this can be done on one server with an application server and a
database since performance requirements will be low. Especially if HW-
accelerated crypto in standard CPU's are used. And, since I haven't seen a
mention of this, make sure there's an open-source verifier w/ patent license +
the log itself is Creative Commons w/ Attribution.

"If this were a product created by a monopoly with 80% market share"

That's what your startup intends to achieve by creating and dominating a new
market. Startups 101. My idea can be done by a number of organizations copying
the same template for business, legal, and tech. They can do it for-profit
based on reputation, non-profit set up to not legally be allowed to assist
malicious behavior, or something in between. I'd trust my model so long as it
was auditable w/ all the logs published. Organized crime is a crazy-strong
threat model that might still forge things by coercing people to forge things
with some gains between the event happening and my model detecting it. That's
unavoidable but your model or mine will reduce risk a lot. Mine reduces
operational risk with proven components.

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_aventus
"That's what your startup intends to achieve by creating and dominating a new
market. Startups 101. My idea can be done by a number of organizations copying
the same template for business, legal, and tech."

I recommend finishing the blog post - our core protocol has no fees and we
encourage anyone and everyone to adopt it. This protocol solves the problems
of unregulated scalping and counterfeits. We also have a services layer, which
is an API anyone can use with usage charges, that help integrate the protocol
easier - but we do not force anyone to use these.

So, we intend to dominate the market as a non-profit open protocol that anyone
can use to build their applications on top of. It will create more competition
in the market, since to differentiate people using the protocol will need to
build even more value add services on top to drive users to their applications
rather than others.

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nickpsecurity
"our core protocol has no fees and we encourage anyone and everyone to adopt
it."

There's all kinds of standard protocols dominated by one player with first-
mover advantage and branding. You all going for that plus having an open
protocol aren't incompatible. I give you all props for having enough integrity
to make the protocol open and encourage independent use. Good luck to you
regardless of whether I prefer simpler, old tech for these problems. I'd
rather the problem get solved by an available, good-enough solution rather
than not at all. :)

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_aventus
Hi all, thank you for reading. If you have any questions or comments please
ask us on our slack channel:
[https://slack.aventus.io](https://slack.aventus.io).

