this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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I have never heard of one realistic and useful plan for NFTs. And I like to be contrarian whenever possible, since I'm kind of a smug prick. Hit me with 'em!
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.
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.
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.
They could set up an efficient secondary market if they wanted to, without NFTs.
But they do not want to, so they will never use NFTs to do so either.
Aiports overbook because there are always passengers that do not show up and they want to make sure their planes are fully booked.
Those late/missing passengers arent going to sell their ticket to other passengers. So NFTs would literally solve nothing
They could, but NFTs are a cheaper, more secure way of transacting.
That doesn't have to be how they work.
What? They would love to.
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.
terrible analogy, but one can only hope. we don't need the bullshit that comes with everyone using cars.
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.
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.
😏
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.
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.
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.
You can do this with a database.
You can do this with a PIN code.
You can do this with databases.
In any situation where you might be tempted to call an NFT "legally binding", it's not the NFT that's binding, it's a contract, and the NFT is just a proxy for the contract. The NFT adds no value.
Blockchain is a database. One that everyone automatically can access. The advantage is that you don't need an admin console. There is no complex on-board and control of users.
Great. You know what, I agree that those are, at least in theory, real advantages.
Question: how much value would this realistically add? When was the last time the Average Joe had a problem with illegal subletting or a complicated discovery process? I know I've never had these problems.
Also, this is all coming with a new attack vector---malicious smart contracts. In a court of law, I can go before a judge and argue that the terms of a contract are unfair, and they're more likely to side with me, a non-sophisticated actor. "Smart contracts" do not give you any such recourse. I don't want to live in a world where cold machine logic overrides human judgement, and I think most ordinary people feel the same way.
No, it is not. A signed piece of paper is not a contract, either, even though we often refer to it as such metonymically. A contract is a legally-binding agreement. It may be represented and recorded in some form, but it doesn't have to be. There's no formal specification for legal contracts. Lawyers/businesses like written contracts in standard legal language because it helps with reliability and predictability, but nothing says a contract has to look like that. Two parties can meet and agree verbally on some terms, without writing anything down, and that can count as a contract.
Yes, NFTs have this thing called "smart contracts", but the relationship between "smart contracts" and actual legal contracts is not one-to-one: not every smart contract is a legal contract. More importantly, though, if crypto advocates' claims are valid, then it shouldn't matter whether a smart contract is a legal contract. A legal contract has an external enforcement mechanism---namely, the courts. In contrast, a smart contract is supposed to be self-executing. This is the whole point of the "code is law" slogan.
If code is law, then the courts aren't necessary, and it doesn't matter whether an NFT is a legal contract. If code is not law---in other words, if the law is law---then the courts are still the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and the NFT itself is pointless. It could have just been a digital record stored in two databases, and it would have been equally legally binding with much less hassle.
In order to prove that crypto is not nearly as useful as crypto advocates have claimed, all I need to do is point to generative AI. I think the value of generative AI in the short term is overblown, but nonetheless, just look at how it's been adopted by basically every tech company in the world just a few years after ChatGPT's release. Now look at how many companies are using crypto in mission-critical contexts more than two decades after Bitcoin was invented. Sure, a few companies hyped crypto adoption in order to pump their stock back when crypto was The Thing, but how much do we hear about all that stuff these days?
Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.