I’m just not sure what utility this has for a traveler. You don’t need NFTs to implement transferrable plane tickets, though this does seem to try to ensure that the airline(?) gets a cut of any sales between passengers. It’s the same pattern every time with NFTs, the only thing they seem to do is complicate matters while attempting to make a market out of thin air and take a cut of any related transactions.
No major US airline allows passengers to transfer tickets, and I don’t think it’s because they lack the technology to do so and NFTs would fill the void. If they did do this and it was possible to buy and sell plane tickets on an open blockchain based market, couldn’t one just buy all of the tickets for popular flights and sell them at a markup?
You know a guy who first saw the new fangled automobiles once said ‘That’s all well and good, but where do you attach the horse?’
You don’t NEED the internet, or digital transactions, or credit cards, or any of the other dozens of technological advancements in wealth management that have come about since the 50s either but they exist and make everyone’s lives easier
Tickets as NFTs are a great idea because it absolutely prevents overbooking. Did you ever even consider that? Can’t mint more NFTs than the plane has seats
You know a guy who first saw the new fangled automobiles once said ‘That’s all well and good, but where do you attach the horse?’
Sure, but this is not a positive argument for your position. This does not mean that everything with doubters is, in fact, good and misunderstood.
Tickets as NFTs are a great idea because it absolutely prevents overbooking. Did you ever even consider that? Can’t mint more NFTs than the plane has seats
You can prevent overbooking without blockchain/NFTs. Airlines overbook because they want to, and presumably they would still want to do so if they adopted NFT tickets. There is nothing about using blockchain that would prevent this, they would just mint more NFTs than there are seats for each flight with the hope/expectation that a few ticket holders would not show up.
Sure, but this is not a positive argument for your position.
So now you’re just going to discount the time I spent setting you up several use cases?
You can prevent overbooking without blockchain/NFTs. Airlines overbook because they want to,
And the reason for their overbooking, maximum profit, would be achieved seamlessly with a blockchain based ticketing system as there is no human input lag that causes double booking
You keep arguing that there are other ways of doing the things that the programatic nature of NFT contracts offer but NONE of them provide it all in one ridiculously transparent, unfalsifiable open source way that can be literally implemented on every platform
That’s why I used the car and the horse example, you are the one saying: “Yes we already have horses already, why do we need a car? And how would a horse even USE a car you silly billy?”
The really sad thing is I’m waiting for a moment of realization from you that it is blatantly clear you are incapable of achieving. Pretending to be open minded is intellectually dishonest
So now you’re just going to discount the time I spent setting you up several use cases?
I didn’t thoughtlessly discount anything, I’m just saying that while “some people didn’t see how cars could be useful” is true, it does not mean that everything that has doubters is actually a misunderstood wonder. Plenty of things with fervent true believers that have been supposed to change everything were, in fact, duds.
And the reason for their overbooking, maximum profit, would be achieved seamlessly with a blockchain based ticketing system as there is no human input lag that causes double booking
Human input lag is not generally the cause of overbooking. The overbooking is intentional. NFTs have no unique ability to prevent it. This is not a tech problem, and so it cannot be solved by tech. I’m open to the possibility that airline tickets are just a bad example, of course, and it wasn’t even an example you presented.
You keep arguing that there are other ways of doing the things that the programatic nature of NFT contracts offer but NONE of them provide it all in one ridiculously transparent, unfalsifiable open source way that can be literally implemented on every platform
This is all rather vague. The benefits are not obvious, so you need to be more specific.
That’s why I used the car and the horse example, you are the one saying: “Yes we already have horses already, why do we need a car? And how would a horse even USE a car you silly billy?”
You might be the one who is saying “the hyperloop will change travel forever!” Everything you’re writing seems like vague motivated reasoning presupposing that NFTs are the solution to problems that you don’t even seem to understand.
The really sad thing is I’m waiting for a moment of realization from you that it is blatantly clear you are incapable of achieving. Pretending to be open minded is intellectually dishonest
So an airline wants to sell every single possible seat on every plane, but not have too many people on the plane on takeoff because buying off those customers costs money, but plenty of customers cancel last minute so it is inefficient to only hand out just as many tickets as seats. The number is arrived at by sophisticated behavior algorithms that aren’t very accurate, but are more accurate than current human estimations
There are also 3rd party sellers that receive segments of ticket and can and do act as brokerages in a grey market that if the idiots in washington understood would be a lot more heavily regulated
What NFTs bring to the game: New classes of tickets: Quantum Tickets. They’re not really tickets till you board.
So you have normal seating for the existing classes, 1st to coach that are NFT guaranteed and once you have your ticket you KNOW you will be getting that seat. You can also transfer ownership of this ticket yourself for any reason, automatically and seamlessly through the app
Now we have a pool of quantum travelers that for the savings of a bit on the price, enter a randomized allocation of the remaining unused tickets, late cancellations, and other non-check ins.
ALL seamless, all on the app. From the outside it looks like any other boarding situation but now we have a very good chance every single sold seat will be taken.
Can’t do that with existing systems, the methods of transfer are platform locked and even ones that offer API refuse to play with other services.
NFTs make a universal contract language that any business can use to transfer assets automatically and programattically in such a way that CANNOT be falsified
There is literally no other open source, cross platform solution that even comes close to offering 30% of this
interesting, around here we do it with numbered seats. if you give each seat a specific number turns out you can match that with numbered tickets. somehow airlines don’t make tickets with numbers that don’t match with any seats. insane tech.
way to miss the point. literally everyone knows that they overbook. that’s not because they’re not using nfts. it’s because they want to overbook. you said nfts would prevent overbooking. I say you can just prevent overbooking by not overbooking. it has nothing to do with nfts.
It’s a bit chicken and egg. One of the reasons airlines overbook is because there is no efficient secondary market.
But overbooking is seen as a profit center (I.e. consumers lose out) so only low cost airlines looking to provide consumer value would have any interest in NFT tickets.
actually having to pay off extra passengers can get expensive, up to 10k per seat, so even one willing passenger without a seat is a loss, but they accept that possibility based on a curve over time of profit across all flights calculated on historical outcomes. Some flights will be overbooked and they accept that as the cost of making sure that other flights are more filled
The reason they overbook is that there is no human way to seamlessly transfer ticket ownership between pass holders down to the moment of boarding, across all venues and services where the tickets are sold.
NFTs add a platform that is universal, secure, and publicly accessible. No other database offers that
if you want to do it you can do it without nfts. clearly the airlines don’t deem it worth the effort. there’s no reason why you can’t make a system that easily transfers ownership. this is trying to find a problem for a solution.
Yeah, but if your only example of NFTs being useful is that one of the worst airlines in the industry adopted them, that’s not a great argument. “Shitty company uses system, so system must be useful,” doesn’t really track.
Well, first, I’m very skeptical of the NFTs’ ability to resolve overbooking. Overbooking is a choice airlines make to maximize profits. We could force airlines to stop overbooking tomorrow if we wanted, and they could try to prevent losses by making tickets non-refundable or charging extra for refundable tickets (tactics they already use in addition to overbooking). It seems to me the main problem is that capitalism motivates airlines to maximize profits instead of transporting people to their destination. The obvious solution to me is to nationalize the airlines, not create a third-party aftermarket for airline tickets.
Also, the article you shared actually makes no mention of overbooking. I have to assume the solution being suggested by NFT tickets is something along the lines of, “We sell only the amount of tickets on the flight, and while we won’t refund your ticket, if you can’t make your flight, you’re free to sell your ticket to whoever you like.”
Seems like a decent enough idea, except that you need to go through the third-party NFT company to sell your ticket, you may lose value on your ticket or even not find a buyer, and you still need to make any changes to your ticket 72 hours in advance, meaning it would be useless in resolving no-shows from flight delays. You also wind up paying a transaction fee to the NFT company and the airline for any changes you make, so really it seems what’s being suggested here is that, instead of being able to get a refund on your ticket, you do the job of selling your own ticket on the free-market, and both the ticket company and airline profit from your labor. And again, since this article makes no mention of overbooking, I have to assume Flybondi will continue that practice anyway.
I also have to point out that this article was written by and unnamed, “crypto believer,” and self-published in Medium by an NFT company. It’s not exactly a great source.
All that being said, I’m sure there are uses for NFTs, just like their are uses for generative AI and VR. My point isn’t that they’re useless, just that their uses are overstated and create a financial bubble. I can see how generative AI might be useful first-draft copywriting, but it’s not capable of replacing a writers room, or even giving accurate search results. VR is great for gaming, but no matter how much money Zuckerberg threw at it, it couldn’t do anything for meetings that Zoom didn’t do better. I’m not sure what the B2B uses of NFTs are, but I believe you when you tell me they exist; they just couldn’t create value for random JPEGs. The NFT collapse bankrupted a bunch of crypto-bros, Zuckerberg’s VR investment cost Facebook $60 billion, and the generative AI bubble is going to hit every single tech company and the stock market as a whole.
Overbooking is a choice airlines make to maximize profits. It seems to me the main problem is that capitalism motivates airlines to maximize profits instead of transporting people to their destination.
Agreed. That’s why it can only start with low cost airlines outside the US.
Also, the article you shared actually makes no mention of overbooking.
Unfortunately we can only speculate why they chose NFTs over traditional tickets.
I also have to point out that this article was written by and unnamed, “crypto believer,” and self-published in Medium by an NFT company. It’s not exactly a great source.
Don’t shoot the messenger. There are other sources available via Google. And the airline website describes it as ticketing 3.0
My point isn’t that they’re useless, just that their uses are overstated and create a financial bubble.
Agreed. Monkey pictures were genius marketing but absolutely useless. A porche 911 NFT isn’t much better. But real b2b use cases do exist (supplychain, green energy, shipping etc.).
Well, I at least partially agree with most of that. I would say that Flybondi’s use of NFT tickets still seems like an excuse to outsource a large portion of their customee services while still taking a 2% cut of any flight changes, with minumal (if any) customer benefit. I remember while ago hearing that concert ticket vendors were experimenting with NFT tickets, and I guess I could see the use case their, but I’d still say that has trade offs with physical tickets, and could best be described as a lateral move. I’d be curious to read any info on how B2B NFTs are used, if you have any links.
I do have disagree on Zuckerberg’s VR gamble, though. AR is significantly different than VR, and he went hard on full-blown VR tech. He may be able to adapt it to AR going forward, but that’s probably going to be salvaging a loss for at least the short to mid-term. Even if it does give him a strong leg up on AR, that’s not really his gambling paying off, that’s placing a bad bet and getting lucky anyway.
Zuck will not get back 60bn from VR, but a lot of that tech (quest 3 with passthrough) is now in AR. They have the opportunity to replace the smartphone.
The idea is to allow efficient resale of airline seats (and for the airline to take a cut of that secondary market). Also proves to buyers that their flight is nor overbooked.
https://nes-tech.medium.com/argentinian-carrier-flybondi-leads-the-way-with-nft-tickets-92da146db296
I’m just not sure what utility this has for a traveler. You don’t need NFTs to implement transferrable plane tickets, though this does seem to try to ensure that the airline(?) gets a cut of any sales between passengers. It’s the same pattern every time with NFTs, the only thing they seem to do is complicate matters while attempting to make a market out of thin air and take a cut of any related transactions.
No major US airline allows passengers to transfer tickets, and I don’t think it’s because they lack the technology to do so and NFTs would fill the void. If they did do this and it was possible to buy and sell plane tickets on an open blockchain based market, couldn’t one just buy all of the tickets for popular flights and sell them at a markup?
This is because US airlines are legally allowed to sell more seats than they have on a flight. Talk about overcomplication.
One could, but there would be a risk of not being able to sell them. Airlines would be taking a cut so they don’t mind, and they sell all their seats.
You know a guy who first saw the new fangled automobiles once said ‘That’s all well and good, but where do you attach the horse?’
You don’t NEED the internet, or digital transactions, or credit cards, or any of the other dozens of technological advancements in wealth management that have come about since the 50s either but they exist and make everyone’s lives easier
Tickets as NFTs are a great idea because it absolutely prevents overbooking. Did you ever even consider that? Can’t mint more NFTs than the plane has seats
Sure, but this is not a positive argument for your position. This does not mean that everything with doubters is, in fact, good and misunderstood.
You can prevent overbooking without blockchain/NFTs. Airlines overbook because they want to, and presumably they would still want to do so if they adopted NFT tickets. There is nothing about using blockchain that would prevent this, they would just mint more NFTs than there are seats for each flight with the hope/expectation that a few ticket holders would not show up.
So now you’re just going to discount the time I spent setting you up several use cases?
And the reason for their overbooking, maximum profit, would be achieved seamlessly with a blockchain based ticketing system as there is no human input lag that causes double booking
You keep arguing that there are other ways of doing the things that the programatic nature of NFT contracts offer but NONE of them provide it all in one ridiculously transparent, unfalsifiable open source way that can be literally implemented on every platform
That’s why I used the car and the horse example, you are the one saying: “Yes we already have horses already, why do we need a car? And how would a horse even USE a car you silly billy?”
The really sad thing is I’m waiting for a moment of realization from you that it is blatantly clear you are incapable of achieving. Pretending to be open minded is intellectually dishonest
I didn’t thoughtlessly discount anything, I’m just saying that while “some people didn’t see how cars could be useful” is true, it does not mean that everything that has doubters is actually a misunderstood wonder. Plenty of things with fervent true believers that have been supposed to change everything were, in fact, duds.
Human input lag is not generally the cause of overbooking. The overbooking is intentional. NFTs have no unique ability to prevent it. This is not a tech problem, and so it cannot be solved by tech. I’m open to the possibility that airline tickets are just a bad example, of course, and it wasn’t even an example you presented.
This is all rather vague. The benefits are not obvious, so you need to be more specific.
You might be the one who is saying “the hyperloop will change travel forever!” Everything you’re writing seems like vague motivated reasoning presupposing that NFTs are the solution to problems that you don’t even seem to understand.
😏
So an airline wants to sell every single possible seat on every plane, but not have too many people on the plane on takeoff because buying off those customers costs money, but plenty of customers cancel last minute so it is inefficient to only hand out just as many tickets as seats. The number is arrived at by sophisticated behavior algorithms that aren’t very accurate, but are more accurate than current human estimations
There are also 3rd party sellers that receive segments of ticket and can and do act as brokerages in a grey market that if the idiots in washington understood would be a lot more heavily regulated
What NFTs bring to the game: New classes of tickets: Quantum Tickets. They’re not really tickets till you board.
So you have normal seating for the existing classes, 1st to coach that are NFT guaranteed and once you have your ticket you KNOW you will be getting that seat. You can also transfer ownership of this ticket yourself for any reason, automatically and seamlessly through the app
Now we have a pool of quantum travelers that for the savings of a bit on the price, enter a randomized allocation of the remaining unused tickets, late cancellations, and other non-check ins.
ALL seamless, all on the app. From the outside it looks like any other boarding situation but now we have a very good chance every single sold seat will be taken.
Can’t do that with existing systems, the methods of transfer are platform locked and even ones that offer API refuse to play with other services.
NFTs make a universal contract language that any business can use to transfer assets automatically and programattically in such a way that CANNOT be falsified
There is literally no other open source, cross platform solution that even comes close to offering 30% of this
And why do you think passengers who cancel last minute would be able to find a replacement passenger in time to sell their ticket to?
You can only achieve that if you … overbook in advance.
Blockchain isn’t going to change that.
You didn’t even bother to read my use cases…
interesting, around here we do it with numbered seats. if you give each seat a specific number turns out you can match that with numbered tickets. somehow airlines don’t make tickets with numbers that don’t match with any seats. insane tech.
How magnificently naive if you think that’s how it happens nowadays…
https://www.getgoing.com/blog/why-do-airlines-overbook/
way to miss the point. literally everyone knows that they overbook. that’s not because they’re not using nfts. it’s because they want to overbook. you said nfts would prevent overbooking. I say you can just prevent overbooking by not overbooking. it has nothing to do with nfts.
NFTs would prove to the customers that their flight is not being overbooked.
but why would they want to do that if the intention is to overbook
It’s a bit chicken and egg. One of the reasons airlines overbook is because there is no efficient secondary market.
But overbooking is seen as a profit center (I.e. consumers lose out) so only low cost airlines looking to provide consumer value would have any interest in NFT tickets.
actually having to pay off extra passengers can get expensive, up to 10k per seat, so even one willing passenger without a seat is a loss, but they accept that possibility based on a curve over time of profit across all flights calculated on historical outcomes. Some flights will be overbooked and they accept that as the cost of making sure that other flights are more filled
The reason they overbook is that there is no human way to seamlessly transfer ticket ownership between pass holders down to the moment of boarding, across all venues and services where the tickets are sold.
NFTs add a platform that is universal, secure, and publicly accessible. No other database offers that
if you want to do it you can do it without nfts. clearly the airlines don’t deem it worth the effort. there’s no reason why you can’t make a system that easily transfers ownership. this is trying to find a problem for a solution.
And you can ride your horse to work and post him up right outside your office
I’m not sure the fact that NFTs are used by the third worst airline in the world, which the Argentinian government just fined $300K for excessive cancelations, is actually a plus for NFTs.
None of that is the fault of the NFT ticket system.
Yeah, but if your only example of NFTs being useful is that one of the worst airlines in the industry adopted them, that’s not a great argument. “Shitty company uses system, so system must be useful,” doesn’t really track.
Someone has to go first. A low cost airline adopted them to avoid the hassles and inefficiencies of overbooking flights.
There are also lots of B2B uses of NFTs, mainly around supply chain and energy tracking, but I thought a B2C example would resonate better here.
Well, first, I’m very skeptical of the NFTs’ ability to resolve overbooking. Overbooking is a choice airlines make to maximize profits. We could force airlines to stop overbooking tomorrow if we wanted, and they could try to prevent losses by making tickets non-refundable or charging extra for refundable tickets (tactics they already use in addition to overbooking). It seems to me the main problem is that capitalism motivates airlines to maximize profits instead of transporting people to their destination. The obvious solution to me is to nationalize the airlines, not create a third-party aftermarket for airline tickets.
Also, the article you shared actually makes no mention of overbooking. I have to assume the solution being suggested by NFT tickets is something along the lines of, “We sell only the amount of tickets on the flight, and while we won’t refund your ticket, if you can’t make your flight, you’re free to sell your ticket to whoever you like.”
Seems like a decent enough idea, except that you need to go through the third-party NFT company to sell your ticket, you may lose value on your ticket or even not find a buyer, and you still need to make any changes to your ticket 72 hours in advance, meaning it would be useless in resolving no-shows from flight delays. You also wind up paying a transaction fee to the NFT company and the airline for any changes you make, so really it seems what’s being suggested here is that, instead of being able to get a refund on your ticket, you do the job of selling your own ticket on the free-market, and both the ticket company and airline profit from your labor. And again, since this article makes no mention of overbooking, I have to assume Flybondi will continue that practice anyway.
I also have to point out that this article was written by and unnamed, “crypto believer,” and self-published in Medium by an NFT company. It’s not exactly a great source.
All that being said, I’m sure there are uses for NFTs, just like their are uses for generative AI and VR. My point isn’t that they’re useless, just that their uses are overstated and create a financial bubble. I can see how generative AI might be useful first-draft copywriting, but it’s not capable of replacing a writers room, or even giving accurate search results. VR is great for gaming, but no matter how much money Zuckerberg threw at it, it couldn’t do anything for meetings that Zoom didn’t do better. I’m not sure what the B2B uses of NFTs are, but I believe you when you tell me they exist; they just couldn’t create value for random JPEGs. The NFT collapse bankrupted a bunch of crypto-bros, Zuckerberg’s VR investment cost Facebook $60 billion, and the generative AI bubble is going to hit every single tech company and the stock market as a whole.
Agreed. That’s why it can only start with low cost airlines outside the US.
Unfortunately we can only speculate why they chose NFTs over traditional tickets.
Don’t shoot the messenger. There are other sources available via Google. And the airline website describes it as ticketing 3.0
Agreed. Monkey pictures were genius marketing but absolutely useless. A porche 911 NFT isn’t much better. But real b2b use cases do exist (supplychain, green energy, shipping etc.).
I think his gamble will pay off for AR. Glasses will be mainstream and will make phones obsolete.
Well, I at least partially agree with most of that. I would say that Flybondi’s use of NFT tickets still seems like an excuse to outsource a large portion of their customee services while still taking a 2% cut of any flight changes, with minumal (if any) customer benefit. I remember while ago hearing that concert ticket vendors were experimenting with NFT tickets, and I guess I could see the use case their, but I’d still say that has trade offs with physical tickets, and could best be described as a lateral move. I’d be curious to read any info on how B2B NFTs are used, if you have any links.
I do have disagree on Zuckerberg’s VR gamble, though. AR is significantly different than VR, and he went hard on full-blown VR tech. He may be able to adapt it to AR going forward, but that’s probably going to be salvaging a loss for at least the short to mid-term. Even if it does give him a strong leg up on AR, that’s not really his gambling paying off, that’s placing a bad bet and getting lucky anyway.
I don’t want to doxx myself but I can link to websites of corporate players.
https://blockchain.ey.com/
https://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/business-services/blockchain-dlt/
https://www.datagumbo.com/en/
Zuck will not get back 60bn from VR, but a lot of that tech (quest 3 with passthrough) is now in AR. They have the opportunity to replace the smartphone.
The most be something I don’t understand. Why would I buy flight tickets from a third party? Is there a market for this?
The idea is to allow efficient resale of airline seats (and for the airline to take a cut of that secondary market). Also proves to buyers that their flight is nor overbooked.
If you book through a travel agency or website, you are already buying 3rd party
NFTs would prevent 3rd parties from overselling flights (this is a big problem actually and is borderline fraud)