Honestly, this sounds pretty good. Of course not as a replacement for refundable bookings - which I don’t think consumers would tolerate (and I think accommodation is a buyer’s market generally) - but as a means to transfer non-refundable bookings. If it’s a choice between not getting a refund at all and being able to attempt to sell the booking at a discount, then please sign me up for the latter.
I don’t really see scalpers being a problem because this isn’t like concert tickets, which have a set price. Hotel room prices are already set in response to supply and demand and there is no point in hotels making bookings non-refundable well in advance at popular times.
Ah yes… When I’m staying at a 700 room hotel that provides all services from behind a single desk, the thing I’m seeking out of that experience is decentralization.
It doesn’t make much economic sense for hotels to do this though. A nontransferable, nonrefundable booking is guaranteed revenue for the hotel. A nonrefundable, but transferable booking may not be, on net. When the hotel is trying to sell off its vacancies as the night in question approaches, it’s bad news if there’s also third-party inventory trying to sell at the same time. They go from having a monopoly on rooms in their hotel, in which case they can price to maximize revenue, to having a competitive market. Even worse, a competitive market where the sellers’ marginal costs are zero.
Any of the other blockchains that allow smart contracts and have low gas. There are dozens. If this idea ever takes off (dubious), there would probably be a dedicated chain just for it eventually.
The problem with a database is that you’ll end up with something like StubHub which has crazy fees and rules. Not sure hotel reservations needs a secondary market, but I think a decentralized system which allows people to trade verified items like tickets, etc. would be beneficial.
I know very little about blockchains, so apologies if this is a dumb or poorly phrased question, but, just to drill into what I think you were saying:
If a hotel wanted to collect a % fee every time the reservation was resold, would there have to be some sort of “reservation marketplace” overseeing the transaction, or could you set up the nft in a way (maybe through a smart contract?) that automatically collected a fee everytime the reservation was exchanged even if two people just did a direct wallet to wallet transfer?
I mostly agree. I think for hotel rooms, whatever system is going to be centralized since there won’t be super high demand and hotels may be reluctant to cede control of their rooms.
I do think for something like game tickets we could see true decentralization - if some ticket issuers start to do NFTs on say Matic or one of the other L2s and that market starts to boom, you’ll see pressure for other issues to also do NFTs that can trade freely.
edit: for your post above - I think the solution would be to charge a % or flat fee, whatever is greater, in order to allow a transfer. I’d hope it wouldn’t be to hard to write the smart contract to do that.
Chastain was charged Wednesday with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with trading on confidential information about which non-fungible tokens were about to be featured on the OpenSea homepage, the Department of Justice said in a press release. The two charges, one for wire fraud and the other for insider trading, each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
The Justice Department alleged in the release that Chastain flipped “dozens of NFTs” after choosing to feature them on the website, selling them for two to five times what he initially paid. Chastain hid his fraud by making these purchases using anonymous digital currency wallets and anonymous OpenSea user accounts, according to the Justice Department.
This is a super interesting case, because NFTs are not (currently treated as) securities. So the conventional notion of “insider trading” doesn’t seem to apply.
The actual indictment charges the defendant with wire fraud and money laundering. The document describes the wire fraud charges as misappropriation of confidential business information, which seems more accurate. (Like someone at Coke stealing the “secret” recipe for Coca-Cola and selling it to Pepsi - that would clearly be a crime, but probably not labeled as insider trading.)
Here’s the basis of the wire fraud allegation (followed by several instances of him violating those obligations by trading to-be featured NFTs):
The statutory allegation on page 6 just says that the defendant used interstate digital communication to carry out this scheme.
The second count, money laundering is just “he engaged in a transaction in an effort to hide the evidence of the earlier-described wire fraud”:
Looking at the indictment, it looks like he was charged with just the two listed and not insider trading.
Looking at the indictment, they refer to it as insider trading, but they don’t charge the insider trading statute - [17 CFR § 240.10b-5] but only the wire fraud statute - [18 US Code § 1343].
As pointed out - insider trading only applies to trading in securities. My assumption would be that they did not want to have to deal with proving whether the NFTs he traded are securities, so easier just to charge wire fraud.
