A New Potential Use Case For Steem: An Electronic Ticket System

in steem •  5 years ago 

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About five minutes ago, I came up with a potential use case for the Steem blockchain. It a blockchain-based electronic ticket system could be build upon it.

The problem: scalping

Suppose you're an event organizer. You want to sell tickets to your event online. While there are many centralized electronic ticket systems in existence, there are problems with them. It can be difficult to prevent scalping. Systems to prevent scalping have been created by Ticketmaster, for example, but they still require complete trust in the ticket sales company. Can they be trusted to prevent scalping? According to some people, not necessarily. Centralized ticket selling companies have their data on their private and centralized servers. Event goers and organizers have no choice but to trust them blindly unless they have sufficient evidence to get law enforcement involved in case there is suspicion of the ticket sales company being involved scalping it or allowing it to happen through incompetence.

The solution: put all transactions on a public blockchain

To me, it seems obvious that a high-throughput public blockchain that has cheap transactions such as Steem would be right tool to make ticket sales completely transparent and verifiable by anyone. JSON objects can be stored on the Steem blockchain. (Games on Steem do not typically post to the chain but just store text on it. Steem nodes ignore those transactions but sidechain nodes like Steem-Engine or centralized apps using the Steem blockchain as their back end can act upon them.)

If Steem-Engine were to support arbitrary user-defined smart contracts at some point in the future, then they could be used to enforce any given rules applied to the transfer of ticket ownership or use. Or the ticket sales app developers could develop a custom smart contract of their own with options user-defined customization that could be integrated with Steem-Engine.

One of the main things the Steem blockchain has going for it is the low cost of transactions and a high capacity for them. An electronic ticket sales app on Steem could generate quite a bit of traffic and thus create organic demand for Resource Credits and thus Steem Power and ultimately STEEM.

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