The point is it doesn't have to be life. We can make things so that you don't need a smartphone, but we choose not to. That's a choice, not some immutable reality of the universe.
Can we make things so that you don't need a smartphone? I don't think this is as trivial as you're making it out to be.
Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge.
The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange.
You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.
Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.
The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution
But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?
If you work in an industry that is solely based off of customer delight, stories like these are what you are looking avoid due to brand damage. It is going to cost more time/energy to deal with the backlash than just coming up with a simple solution in the first place.
Because the future will be very dystopian if we place two tech companies as gatekeepers of everything in life. If Google locks your account and won't help you (which happens!), you don't want that to also take away your ability to bank, go to baseball games, etc.
The point is it doesn't have to be life. We can make things so that you don't need a smartphone, but we choose not to. That's a choice, not some immutable reality of the universe.
Can we make things so that you don't need a smartphone? I don't think this is as trivial as you're making it out to be.
Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge.
The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange.
You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.
Yet, somehow Major League had been selling tickets just fine for more than a century without smartphones.
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Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.
The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution
But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?
What? We sold tickets for literally decades upon decades before smartphones came out. Of course you can do it, it's already been done!
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We can, but why should we?
If you scroll up, there's a link to an example of why at the very top of this page.
Why should we be beholden to the two mega-corporations who control the smartphone market?
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If you work in an industry that is solely based off of customer delight, stories like these are what you are looking avoid due to brand damage. It is going to cost more time/energy to deal with the backlash than just coming up with a simple solution in the first place.
If your imagination is that anemic then the process is compete.
Right? This is no country for old men.
privacy for one.
Because the future will be very dystopian if we place two tech companies as gatekeepers of everything in life. If Google locks your account and won't help you (which happens!), you don't want that to also take away your ability to bank, go to baseball games, etc.
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..because we very recently decided to make it that way