CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) • Hacker News Board

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#31

Post by 1propionyl » Sun, May 25, 2025, 2:36 AM UTC

A lot of overwrought digital solutions here and not the obvious one:

Stop selling online.

Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions.

Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We can handle these cases on a locale by locale basis with a convenience trade off that seems appropriate to the place.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good, and even worse, don't let overwrought privacy-invading and non-accessible digital solutions (that create a playing field tilted towards bad actors equipped with AI tools) be the enemy of a dead simple analog real-world one that leverages our best reputation management system: ourselves.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#32

Post by AlienRobot » Sun, May 25, 2025, 2:39 AM UTC

Matheus28 wrote: post #11

How about: each user creates an account with their legal ID. Obviously unique so they can’t create multiple using the same ID. Before the sale, everyone signs up. Once the sale is started, tickets are distributed using a lottery system for the users who signed up (so refreshing like mad doesn’t give any advantage). Can only buy up to 2 tickets per person (their own and an anonymous companion). ID must be shown and wo…

I'm asked for ID on MercadoLivre and PayPal already, but I think it's for tax purposes. Never tried to create two accounts with the same tax ID.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#33

Post by teeray » Sun, May 25, 2025, 2:49 AM UTC

> The naive economic solution to the problem would be raising ticket prices step by step until it is no longer attractive for scalpers to resell your ticket

You can also just do like The Cure did and destroy the secondary market entirely: you can sell tickets through the platform and only for what you paid for them.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#34

Post by Loughla » Sun, May 25, 2025, 2:58 AM UTC

frabcus wrote: post #19

The option that strikes me as missing, is making users pay a cost before they are randomly entered in a lottery for the ticket. So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered. You could check mul…

The Savannah Bananas do that. You have to enter a lottery to buy tickets.

And if your ID doesn't match the ticket, you don't get in.

It's successful in keeping tickets in the hands of families and fans instead of resale.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#35

Post by londons_explore » Sun, May 25, 2025, 3:03 AM UTC

frabcus wrote: post #19

The option that strikes me as missing, is making users pay a cost before they are randomly entered in a lottery for the ticket. So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered. You could check mul…

I suspect the key thing is that the industry really wants scalpers, but must appear to act against them.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#36

Post by thatguy0900 » Sun, May 25, 2025, 3:07 AM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #15

> So what’s left? If the profit per successful abuse event is $200, the author's suggestion of limits on credit card numbers or phone numbers won't work either. Those are only effective against scaled abuse up to something like $1 / event. Bank accounts would almost certainly be more robust, but that seems quite hard to implement outside of a handful of countries where the online auth ecosystem is built around banks.…

I could see an issue with that since most people are going to be going to events in a group, and won't want to go unless everyone gets their ticket. If I wanted to go with three people, do you lottery us as a group or individually? If I want to go with 5 people and there's a lottery, the best thing to do would be have multiple people buy 5 tickets each, multiply that by every group and you have a lot of people buying tickets who don't actully want them and people who only put one order in get shafted

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#37

Post by markasoftware » Sun, May 25, 2025, 3:16 AM UTC

teeray wrote: post #33

> The naive economic solution to the problem would be raising ticket prices step by step until it is no longer attractive for scalpers to resell your ticket You can also just do like The Cure did and destroy the secondary market entirely: you can sell tickets through the platform and only for what you paid for them.

how does this prevent the scalper communicating with the buyer to demand an out-of-band payment?

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#38

Post by DoctorOW » Sun, May 25, 2025, 3:19 AM UTC

sanity wrote: post #24

A few months back I built a cryptographic alternative to CAPTCHAs called Ghost Keys[1] that uses a small donation as proof-of-humanity. For donating you get an anonymous keypair that works across services without repeated CAPTCHAs. The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators, and donations fund our non-profit[2]. [1] https://freenet.org/ghostkey/ [2] https://freenet.org/

> The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators

Does the number of keys need to scale? If $1 buys a key for life, and signing can be easily automated why would it stop bots?

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#39

Post by clipsy » Sun, May 25, 2025, 3:27 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #35

frabcus wrote: post #19

The option that strikes me as missing, is making users pay a cost before they are randomly entered in a lottery for the ticket. So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered. You could check mul…

I suspect the key thing is that the industry really wants scalpers, but must appear to act against them.

> I suspect the key thing is that the industry really wants scalpers

Why?

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#40

Post by wetpaws » Sun, May 25, 2025, 3:36 AM UTC

markasoftware wrote: post #37

teeray wrote: post #33

> The naive economic solution to the problem would be raising ticket prices step by step until it is no longer attractive for scalpers to resell your ticket You can also just do like The Cure did and destroy the secondary market entirely: you can sell tickets through the platform and only for what you paid for them.

how does this prevent the scalper communicating with the buyer to demand an out-of-band payment?

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