< Home
This document describes the advantages and the basic idea behind smart passes.
When currently buying a third party e-ticket to some event you have to trust that the seller keeps no copy. Otherwise he can still enter the venue with the barcode before you have the chance to do so and your ticket is not good for anything. You are also unable to check if the seller has sold the ticket a lot of times already. There is a lot of trust involved and so a lot of missed opportunities. By registering the tickets on a blockchain you can verify if your ticket is valid and and will grant you access to the event. Furthermore you can even enhance the system to verify issuers/venues - even artists. It also removes the crazy necessary for people to spend time and effort to get out in person and sell their ticket close to the entrance to the event - just because being there in person increases the trust-level over a threshold that people actually buy some tickets.
There are events that have more demand than capacity. Some sell first-come first-serve. But this introduces a lot of stress in operations as once people know the sale is open - there is a peak on the server and this often leads to downtimes, stress, costs and just bad user experience. When leveraging the blockchain and smart contracts we can make this a pleasant and transparent experience.
Some events attack this problem with a ticket lottery. On the blockchain you can also make this process fair and transparent. We can even make smart contracts that prefer the people that not won last year the next year to make things even better.
Smart pass contracts can be combined with crowdsale-contracts. This means when you help fund a event and want to get entry as the perk - you can transparently get a smart pass.
Lets say the members of a DAO want to organize a congress. This way you can only allow ( or prefer ) members of the DAO to buy tickets.
Some events that use a lottery system want to prevent resell of their tickets ( you do not only want the rich people to attend that got tickets for x-times the original price from people that bought passes just for reselling purposes ) With the help of the blockchain you have the chance to make this a bit harder - although solving this problem is a bit harder than the other ones described in this document.
Currently when buying a ticket you not only pay with money you also have to pay with data like your name. Concerned people can have the choice to not go to an event or leave a trace with the name connected to the event. There are some events you might want to join, but you better leave no trace that you have been there.
By having a digital authorization for participants of the event some more interesting things get possible. Imagine events where you can vote for light, music or other things with your pass - even after entering the event. You do not leave the secret on the door. You just show you have the secret and keep it. The key can also be used allow you get get insurance for the ticket e.g. with a etherisc contract for flights. This makes abuse of the insurance by the oracle/data-provider harder. Also is more effective against abusing the insurance for gambling than the checkbox etherrisc uses currently. Another idea that emerged in the context of DevCon3 would be to have a chat that can only be accessed by participants of the event.
You could create smart contracts for selling smart passes that favor people that bought a pass last year - e.g. give them some automatic discount.
You can leverage music ( or artist in general )-related contracts - e.g. ujomusic to verify that the concert ticket you buy will really bring you the pleasure of listening to the music you like. Or make promo actions like automatically yielding one smart pass when you buy like 5 albums of an artist.
With smart contracts we can enable the easy combination of multiple secrets and speed up the process at the entry this way. Lets say a family wants to enter some event - with merging you only have to scan once - without once per family member. You even have the ability to split it up again dynamically - e.g. when something unforeseen parts the groups way before the event.
You can create a smart contract for early-bird sales and yield smart passes from this. You can even improve this with smart-contracts by not having fixed deadlines for certain prices - but use the blockheight - so the ticket gets more expensive with every block.
It is then possible to do smart contracts for ticket auctions. This might be one good way for the problem of price-finding for certain events. If they make it to expensive: the capacity will not be leveraged. If they make it to cheap: they lose money ( or karma points when they are used for paying for the event). This way the extra profits go directly to the artists/promoter/organizer/venue/.. instead of people that trade with tickets.
We will concentrate on event passes first but the standard will also support the above use cases later