CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

Bot Detection, CAPTCHAs, and PoW

• Many argue local behavioral profiling (mouse, scroll, IP patterns) is attractive but runs into false positives and accessibility issues; sophisticated attackers can mimic or reverse‑engineer these signals.
• reCAPTCHA v3 / Cloudflare Turnstile etc. are seen as privacy‑invasive and increasingly ineffective; bots farm out CAPTCHAs to humans or spoof telemetry directly.
• Proof‑of‑work CAPTCHAs are criticized as bad rate‑limiting: SHA‑256 is already massively optimized by GPUs/ASICs, so attackers get orders‑of‑magnitude cost advantage over normal users.
• Some propose proof‑of‑humanity/payment schemes (e.g. one‑time donations, email‑based “humanity providers”), but commenters note these mostly shift cost, don’t stop high‑margin scalpers, and risk excluding poorer users.

Identity, KYC, and the BAP Trilemma

• Repeated theme: you can’t have strong Bot‑resistance, strong Accessibility, and strong Privacy all at once (“BAP theorem”).
• Hard‑KYC proposals: legal ID–backed accounts, lotteries, non‑transferable or name‑locked tickets, ID checks at the gate, government eID/OIDC, or zero‑knowledge proofs on top of eID.
• Objections: legal constraints on ID use, privacy risks, tourist handling, operational burden of ID checks, and slower entry; some report that even strict ID+face recognition (e.g. in China) doesn’t fully stop scalpers.

Economics and Role of Scalpers

• Many argue this is fundamentally an economics problem, not a bot problem: underpriced tickets create arbitrage; scalpers just capture the difference.
• Counterpoint: organizers intentionally underprice to avoid looking greedy, maintain fan goodwill, and generate “sold out in minutes” hype.
• Several suggest the industry—and especially vertically integrated giants—benefit from scalpers: they get instant, low‑risk sell‑through, secondary‑market fee revenue, and sometimes unused tickets that avoid venue costs.
• Others contend scalpers still hurt artists (lost concessions/merch), venues, and fans, and are only tolerated because of monopoly power and misaligned incentives.

Proposed Distribution Schemes

• Lotteries: pre‑registration windows, random allocation, sometimes with small card charges; widely used in Japan and some US sports/entertainment, but require strong identity to prevent multi‑entry.
• Pricing ideas: Dutch auctions, second‑price style bids, regressive price over time with post‑hoc rebates, bonds refundable after attendance, or exponential pricing per additional ticket; criticized as elitist, complex, or group‑unfriendly.
• Strict ticket tying: name on every ticket, mandatory ID at entry, official resale only at face value (or face+cap); some countries and artists already do this, reportedly diminishing secondary markets.
• Offline/analog: sell only at local shops/box offices with human judgment. Opponents say this penalizes tourists and remote fans and scales poorly.

Regulatory and Normative Debates

• One camp advocates regulation: break up ticket monopolies, ban above‑face‑value resale, mandate low‑ or no‑fee transfers, and enforce harsh penalties for systematic scalping.
• Another camp objects that concerts are luxuries and governments shouldn’t fix self‑inflicted mispricing; others reply that citizens widely hate scalpers and antitrust is precisely for such power concentrations.
• Broader tension appears between those prioritizing privacy and accessibility, and those willing to sacrifice both to curb bots and scalpers.