this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Fuck NFTs!

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Fuck NFTs!

NFTs. Fuck 'em expensive images.

Rules:

Icon from Untitled Collection #202729794 by NFTJ2

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Meh, I'd count that as a win.🤸 (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So having read through how GUTS works:

  • The wallets aren't stored by users, instead by the company tied to an account
  • You can thus only resell using their system
  • Tickets are issued and re-issued centrally, allowing for refunds on a system where that's fundamentally impossible (by keeping a list of "invalid" tokens - or since they have control of the wallet they can do whatever)
  • Purchases are made through normal online payments, not crypto

So please explain to me how this system benefits from being based on NFTs. Looks to me like the only thing NTFs are doing here is adding overhead and a marketing gimmick.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The benefit is the protocol can be used by any other ticket resellers worldwide very easily without having to set up some kind of multinational co-op and that the protocol/smart contract enforces the rules.

Usually the argument I'd hear is "But couldn't any company do this with a database?" and the answer is "Sure they could - now show me a company with shareholders who profit off of their consumers getting fucked over habitually that's willing to do it."

Ticketmaster thrives on being a law unto themselves, everybody complains about them, here's something that fixes it, proven to work for years, millions of tickets sold with no sign of a scalping market and the people who hate shitcoins throw their toys out of the pram and insist on maintaining Ticketmaster's dominance.

Congrats I guess, you get what you deserve.

Your conflating the idea of BTC or other currencies being decentralised with the needs of a specific protocol - not everything has to be shitcoin maximalism, it just has to be useful to the businesses and consumers using it. Purchases being made though normal money is a feature, not sure why you'd want it to be crypto since you hate it, you don't want to force people to see the boring backend stuff that shouldn't matter to them, that's what smart contracts are essentially for. The protocol enforces a ruleset, that's it. If it was designed to be transferrable wherever to whomever without using the protocol the original negative point you had at first (which you seemed to think is a bad thing, as do I) would now exist with people selling wallets and such.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I think there's some confusion over how these systems work, so I'll do my best to explain it and that should clear things up.

  • You create an account with GUTS. They keep your credentials in a database.
  • You enter personally identifying information, to associate your account with your identity. This data is kept in their database.
  • You buy a ticket to some event using your credit card or a bank transfer. This ticket is associated with your account in their database.
  • You find out you can no longer go to the event, so you want to sell the ticket.
  • The only way to sell your ticket is through the GUTS market. This is the case because GUTS is the central authority on GUTS tickets.
  • GUTS enforces that you can't sell the ticket for more than you bought it for. They do this by checking their database for the price of the ticket.
  • When you sell the ticket, the buyer needs to have a GUTS account and pays using their credit card or a bank transfer.
  • After selling the ticket the money is then transferred into your bank account.
  • When a ticket is scanned at the event GUTS checks their database for whether that is a valid ticket tied to your account.

You might notice that absolutely none of that requires any interaction whatsoever with NFTs. That's because they're entirely redundant in this system. Here's what GUTS also does on the backend in order to pretend their business is built on blockchain:

  • When you create an account GUTS also creates a crypto wallet. This wallet is kept on their servers and stored in their database.
  • When you buy a ticket from GUTS they mint an NFT using the GET protocol and transfer it into the wallet only they have access to.
  • When you sell a ticket to someone else they transfer it from the wallet on your account only they have access to, to the wallet in the other person's account only they have access to.
  • When a ticket is scanned at the event GUTS issues a scannedTicket event on the NFT. (This is redundant even in the GET protocol, I really don't understand why this exists)

(Note this is a simplification; there's batching going on to reduce costs)

Here's a couple important things to keep in mind:

The GET protocol is simply a smart contract(s). It can be minted, sold, resold, scanned, checked, invalidated and claimed. that's it. There is no authentication, no money transfer, no identity checking, no refunds, no customer support system. None of the things that are hard about selling tickets is helped by the GET protocol.

The money a ticket reseller gets doesn't go through the smart contract - it would only be able to do that if the money was first converted to crypto and then back. So when a ticket is resold that money goes straight to GUTS's bank account and then to the resellers. As such the only thing enforcing that scalpers can't sell at a higher price is GUTS's servers. Not the smart contract.

The GET protocol in theory lets you be independent of the seller - you can sell tickets with a simple transaction on ethereum or polygon. Not so with GUTS, because they have full ownership of the wallets.

Now that we're hopefully on the same page I'll respond to some of your claims:

Usually the argument I’d hear is “But couldn’t any company do this with a database?” and the answer is “Sure they could - now show me a company with shareholders who profit off of their consumers getting fucked over habitually that’s willing to do it.”

GUTS is a for-profit private company. I agree shareholders can often make things worse, but lets not pretend the same profit motive isn't there.

Ticketmaster thrives on being a law unto themselves, everybody complains about them, here’s something that fixes it, proven to work for years, millions of tickets sold with no sign of a scalping market and the people who hate shitcoins throw their toys out of the pram and insist on maintaining Ticketmaster’s dominance.

Weird take, I have no problem with GUTS existing. If they're helping break Ticketmaster's monopoly more power to them. But their use of NTFs and blockchain is pointless.

Actually if I want to give them as much credit as I can here's my take: They wanted to build GUTS to fix scalping, but VCs aren't interested in that. So they had the fantastic idea of using the NFT craze to their advantage. They say they're using NFTs, get huge investment to build out infrastructure and get the business running. Now they know that NFTs on a technical level don't actually help at all, so they build a traditional ticketing platform and then add the GET protocol on top to keep investors happy.

If it was designed to be transferrable wherever to whomever without using the protocol the original negative point you had at first would now exist with people selling wallets and such.

All the negatives I listed were for actual NFT-based tickets, where ticket buyers own the wallet and have to pay in crypto. Such a system would never get any mass adoption, but it's also the only actual way you use NFTs for tickets.

If a system doesn't let you own the wallet and pay in crypto, then their crypto-based systems are just for show.

Sorry for the essay. I wrote it mostly for myself, but if you made it all the way through thanks.