New question added by Kasper on 20–1–2018.

Q: As GUTS Tickets currently uses a SMS verification in order to login to a smart ticket doesn’t this mean that scalpers could sell trow-away smart phones(or sim-cards) with smart tickets on them and resell those? Wouldn’t that completely way of reselling circumvent the margin control protocol as described in the protocol?

A: As of now, yes it would, selling physical phones will completely circumvent the SMS verification and thus allow for unbounded margins on the tickets sold. However, this would mean that scalpers would have to set up infrastructure to sell and ship a physical object(a SIM-card or a sell a whole smart phone) holding the smart ticket.

Currently all a re-seller of a ticket has to do is email a PDF file containing a QR code to the buyer. It doesn’t require much analysis to conclude that emailing a static QR code, as is now common with current ticketing infrastructure(mostly based on having a unique email address), is a lot cheaper, more scale-able and thus more profitable for scalpers.

Benefits of SMS verification

The SMS verification method makes reselling of scalped tickets with bots a much bigger hassle as scalpers would have to start shipping/swapping physical phones and/or sim-cards. Basically it will take the scale out of online ticket scalping and even if scalpers can make it scale it will drastically increase operation costs for scalpers as hardware investments and infrastructure will be needed. Higher costs for the scalper will mean higher mark-ups for the buyers of the ticket. Besides to guarantee higher costs for scalpers/buys it will also result in that when buying a secondary ticket the buyer will have to take into account the shipping time for the phone/SIM card to arrive at their address. This making last-minute reselling/trading practically impossible. Using such a ticket is also much less easy(as you’ll have to either swap SIM cards or boot up your new throw away smartphone). Overall this verification method goes a long way, just not all the way.

Balancing solving the problems and ticketing user experience

When solving the ticket scalping problem one seeds to find a delicate balance between preventing large scale ticket scalping while at the same time ensuring that buying a ticket won’t become an endless process of entering data and verifying endpoints. One should recognize that a perfect and ‘watertight’ solution (like putting tickets on name, like with a plane ticket) and thus requiring people to identify themselves at the entrance of a venue is not the solution. It only moves the burden of proof to the entrance of the venue, which isn’t exactly ideal from an venue/organizer & crowd safety perspective. You don’t have to take my word for it, there are numerous events that have tried this ‘plane-ticket’ approach. Check news articles about these attempts here (1,2,3). Overall this approach doesn’t really seem to work.

Also I am personally of the belief that identifying yourself with an ID card is kind of medievalish, why not use the thing that we literally use for everything else in our lives? Why not bring event ticketing to the 21st century and use the smartphone like we use for messaging, news and even payments. Why not ticketing then?

Usable ≠ scale-able ≠ executable ≠ sell-able