> Right but there's no need.

There is always a need for a central authority to issue tickets. Some company operates the venue, and opens the gates for people. There is an organisation that is running the show.

When this is the case you don't need a distributed ledger and all the complications that come with that.

> Hyperbole isn't doing any favours here.

That system is overcomplex for ticket issuing. Anything that requires the general public to keep secret keys secret (and not lose them, ever) is pretty much a bad idea.

> This is true of all distributed systems.

No, it isn't. As much as I'm not a cryptocurrency fan, the whole point of things like Bitcoin is that there is not a central authority, and all the complexity in the protocol comes from building a distributed consensus. When you have a central authority (ticket issuer, venue operator, whatever) that is not going away in this scheme, you don't need that.

> They haven't though have they?

This is a market failure and won't be solved by a blockchain. What you need is competition which unlocks the venues and their exclusivity agreements. Nothing about the specific software implementation of the ticket issuing system really helps here.

> And it comes for free with blockchains

No, it doesn't, someone has to run the infrastructure (even if it's just nodes), write the smart contracts (and pay the gas or whatever to run them), tie in a web UI that runs somewhere, connect all this to the information about the venues, all sorts. That's not 'free'. A database can manage ticket records for a trivial amount of money, and would have a similar amount of other infrastructure needed around it to provide a full service. The datastore implementation here is not a particularly interesting part of the problem.

> If this takes place on a public chain then the ownership and scalping of any given ticket is fully traceable.

Yet we don't need a chain to do that. We can do that with any old DB. Blockchain also can't (for instance) stop people selling their private keys to each other instead of actually performing transfers, just as a DB can't stop people doing that with a username and password or whatever gets used there. And if you say "Well we tie that to real ID using a third party system"...

> I'll grant you however that blockchain stuff doesn't solve KYC problems. It can certainly help though, given vouching systems by trusted third parties

Again, a blockchain adds nothing, if there's a third party vouching system we can just use that in the traditional system too.

> I'll let you be the one to hold your breath for ticketmaster to create data APIs for individual gigs.

And I'll let you be the one to hold your breath waiting for them to embrace your blockchain solution too. Again, it's the market issue that you need to tackle, not the implementation one.

> Yes. As discussed everything that can be decentralised can be centralised

Right, and in this case it is centralised by necessity, because someone is running the gig. You can't remove that authority and that renders the blockchain part of solution a complete irrelevance and an implementation detail.

The problem here is you are looking at a market failure and deciding that if we just throw blockchains at it then it'll magically be fixed. But the blockchain solution doesn't address any of the market problems, and everything you're saying is a wonderful side-effect of using a blockchain can be done with any ticketing software solution.

I could sing the praises of a piece of software I'm building with a nice web front end and API access and a database backend, ownership traceability through simple DB records, the same third party ID integration. I can make the whole DB accessible for the public to query if I want, so data transparency is preserved. See how this solves the same sorts of issues? I could even claim mine's superior because if you phone me up and say "my ticket was stolen" and can prove your ID through that neat third party service, I can sort that out for you because my data structures aren't immutable.

But in the end my magic solution would be just as useless as yours in the face of ticketmaster's swathe of venue exclusivity agreements and stranglehold on the market, because the software implementation details are not a solution to the actual problem.

So you can shout "this could all be solved if we forced the world to use a blockchain solution!" and you wouldn't be wrong, but the fact that it's got a blockchain or not is not the good part, it's the forcing change that's the good part.

> Unless you want / care about ... public programmability the chain gives, ofc you won't care.

Exactly! Spot on! If public programmability was the whole problem in that space, you might have a great solution, but it's not! That's not even a tiny part of the problem with the ticket marketplace, and certainly isn't remotely interesting to most ticket-buyers.

This whole argument is the very definition of what's wrong with the cryptocurrency/blockchain space - instead of trying to solve the real problem (ticketmaster market dominance and abusive practice, backed up with effective monopoly) you're trying to see where you can shove a blockchain, and pretending that fixes something. It doesn't, it's just an implementation detail of a software solution that by itself does nothing to address a market problem.

Wouldn't it be nice if ticketmaster didn't rule the roost and act like dicks? Sure would. And if we could do more with our tickets? And maybe push profiteers out of the system? Oh yes. The specific way we encode, store and transfer ticket ownership records in a non-ticketmaster ticketing system isn't going to change that. Market competition or market regulation might. A specific data structure can't achieve this by itself.