Requirement 3 was just nice to haves to make a better culture around ticketing to fight scalpers and related problems. The first two are mostly the meat of the ticketing ecosystem.

You ultimately need to trust the provider

That's not the ultimate trust, and whether or not I trust them has no bearing on purchasing tickets. The point is, people can sell me a fake ticket and I won't really know until I get to the venue. Providers committing fraud is pretty rare.

All the decentralised smart contracts in the world won’t help you if they’re scamming you.

You don't know what you're talking about then. You can absolutely prove the vender issued the NFT. And you can absolutely prove you own the NFT. And you can absolutely transfer ownership of the NFT in a provable way. I don't know what other argument to make if you just believe incorrect facts.

So just trust them. With a database.

I really don't understand the desire for you to want to pay 15 to 30% fees to go to a venue. Is it hard for you to imagine a world where that is not necessary?

If you really want, produce digitally signed tickets that can be verified against that database with an API.

That's requirement 2. I should be free to hand my ticket to someone else, digitally. Now we both need to have some custom software talking to your database, and we are in integration hell trying to get ownership transferred in a secure way. Now we're running a business equivalent to StubHub with thousands of staff trying to have clients upload their tickets to this database in a verifiable way, for no purpose other than you don't want to admit blockchains solve some interesting problems.

why do I, as a event-goer, actually care about transparency?

Because you want to know you own the ticket. Can you imagine flying to a town, getting to a venue, and holding a fake ticket? Oof...

Or hell, just print physical tickets that can be physically transferred.

I don't think we're really having a debate anymore. You can print your physical tickets from Ticketmaster. It doesn't remove their 30% fee. It doesn't make ticketing more convenient. Why invent solutions to problems we aren't talking about?

Throw in a Merkle tree if you really want transparency.

How does a retrievable Merkletree from a database meet any of the requirements I asked for? What does that even mean, to throw in a Merkle tree? Are you trying to convince me you can prevent double-writes to the database? What is this API you are imagining, where I can give ownership of a ticket to someone else? And now we've got thousands of venues with their own schemas. What are you even arguing here? It just sounds like you want to hate blockchains, heh.

And when courts disagree with the smart contract, or there’s a bug, or someone’s key is phished… It’s an interesting idea, but it isn’t practical.

The third requirement was to cover some of this. Vendor canceling tickets and other maintenance actions. Courts are involved all the time with existing businesses, so I am not sure why "courts" is a counterpoint to an NFT backed ticket ecosystem. If anything, it makes it stupidly clear to the courts who "owns" the ticket. People can be phished right now, so I am not sure how that's a counter-point to any of the requirements I mentioned. If the customer can prove they were phished, it is extremely easy to revoke the NFT and issue a new one.

Anyways, I think we've run this course. Ive enjoyed chatting. My goal was just to raise some awareness since I only see poorly thought out critiques of NFTs. There are some good reasons to not want an NFT system, but there are also some unique benefits.

Cheers