alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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.