Noted, I made an edition to the comment! Thanks.

I'm really open to other Blockchain initiatives in the ticketing space in general (like Blocktix and Aventus I applaud) but I have some serious fundamental reservations about how things are structured at EventChain. As I understood they don't even have a soft cap, meaning they will keep all the money they raise regardless. I will immediately correct this if I am wrong but I am 99% sure this is the case, and if so that is saying something IMO.

Correction: Apparently EventChain does have a softcap of 2000 ETH and this was communicated in the Slack not in the whitepaper. So what I said is not completely true then (although its strange not to communicate this on paper/officially) But still stand by my statement that I have reservations.

Ethereum will most probably be the only way to contribute to our ICO.

If you hold other crypto's you could use services like shapeshift https://shapeshift.io/#/coins to change your contribution into ETH. We might look into other options but due to logistics and safety these options will only be available for event organizers and other strategic partners as these are a lot less comfortable with crypto and add value to the protocol at large by having them staked.

So in a way you are right, there is a lot of potential for this technology/protocol in literally anything that involves ownership of data objects and registering changes in ownership in an efficient and transparent way. The industries you mention are good examples where the technology can be used as well. We also have had companies that excel in online hotel registrations (really well-known ones) approach us and asking if we would be interested in doing the same for that industry. These are all great opportunities and one could dream endlessly about how great it all could work if it would be done.

But at the end of the day, it is also really important to stay realistic and focus on market segments that allow you to implement your tech and expose it to real-world consumers as soon as possible. The aim is to fail quickly and often, finetuning the technology/protocol based upon real end-user feedback as you do so. As such the event space is perfect as it has real problems that can be solved with our tech and the way the industry is structured makes it perfect to test and improve the technology in incremental steps. As you can imagine train and bus tickets is a lot harder to experiment and fine tune with. First of all it a continuous service meaning that you can't stop or pause to implement improvements, you basically have to have all the fundamentals right at the get-go this is not impossible but when you want to do that it would really help to have some gained some real-world experience first. 

I also would like to point out that apart from other industries and usecases being very interesting theoretically, GUTS/GET-protocol is first and foremost a ticketing system. It is a huge market with big problems and very little innovation (they are still selling QR codes on pieces of paper for gods sake! ) Hope this answers your question, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

We certainly have plans to expand, more news about that soon! I have commented on this same question a few hours ago in this same thread, so for a more in-depth answer for this question please refer to that question. Thanks for the compliment btw

We sure intend to take our solution abroad soon, but before scaling up it is important to first fine-tune the product/solution you are scaling. As event ticketing is a highly consumer-facing solution this means that UX and ease of use should receive a lot of attention before you decide to scale up rapidly (both in event size as in other locales/regions) Consumers with wide range of backgrounds and technological knowledge will be interacting with all aspects of your application, not to mention all the different devices and browsers people use to  interact with the product. From a distance 'scaling up' might look like a linear process but in reality, it is very hairy and complex. Anyhow, thanks for your support! Soon we'll have some exciting news about this subject so stay tuned.

Good to hear you like what we are doing idoycodet! Everybody is more than welcom to join our slack group https://guts.tickets/slack to stay up to date with our updates and announcements as well as to have the opportunity to ask us questions!

Hi dieselmeister! I would suggest checking out our white paper and looking around on our website. Our proposed solution and team is different in so many ways I am not sure where to begin   I would also advise just googling 'Eventchain ICO reddit' and see what you get. Always research your investments with care and consider multiple sources along the way.

Hi Stavri, thanks for your interest! You are right in your assessment that there are some similarities with the Aventus ICO. There is some overlap in that Aventus also wants to provide a protocol/infrastructure that provides an internal primary and secondary market for ticket holders of a certain event. As finding similarities is quite easy, as both initiatives strive to solve the problems in the primary and secondary ticketing market I will focus on the differences in this post. I am not in any way trying to put Aventus down or criticize their approach/solution just want to provide you with my view on how these two companies are different.  

Difference in execution / market penetration
GUTS was founded in 2016 and has been active in the market since. As of now, GUTS tickets employs 9 people of which 6 are developers, some of these team members are relatively new, some of them have been with GUTS for quite some time. Between 6/2016 and 6/2017 this team has predominantly been preoccupied with developing and testing a ticketing system that works and is able serve the needs of both the event organizer as of the consumer using the system (so usability and UX wise) Only after GUTS had gained this valuable market experience (for examples check our blog!) in the several pilots GUTS conducted the decision was made to do an ICO in order to accelerate the growth and  further push toward more transparency and decentralization. With all these lessons gained by experience in mind, the GET-protocol white paper was written in the summer of 2017. At the moment of writing GUTS has an already live and operational product, with paying customers and a team that has formed organically of the course of 1.5 years.  Everything described in the white paper comes from a very practical 'but will it actually work' perspective and less from a 'wouldn't it be cool if' angle. I am not saying the Aventus WP is written from that angle, just mainly pointing out the GUTS white paper and its proposed and partially already realized and tested solutions are written with the operational/practical nuances of the industry in mind. Also, GUTS has already gained experience in how to onboard customers in a bootstrap manner, something you won't necessarily learn when you start off all comfortable.    

Difference in concept / solution
The Aventus solution seems to have a heavy focus on putting tickets on a name, which will mean that everyone entering the venue will have to identify him or herself with an ID or credit card. While this is approach will prevent that tickets can be sold outside of the system (as the verifiers at the venue will be able to look up to whom the ticket is registered) if will be very costly both monetarily(in manpower needed for verification) as in processing time(everybody has to be checked 1 by 1) In the past, there have been several bands that have demanded that their tickets are sold on name (there still are bands that require that) and as such there are ticketing companies specialized in that type of ticketing (Friendly Fire for example) The solution you can see working in our sandbox environment(and tested during real events) is based on phone verification via SMS(other verification methods will be added soon) In the age of mobile tickets we believe that the printed out QR has had its time and is ready to be retired. Aventus has mentioned on their blog a few weeks ago that in some cases (lower value ticket) they would consider nesting the tickets in phones cache like GUTS but they still seem to prefer to put the tickets on the buys name. While I can see that one would find that this point is quite a straw-man argument (somebody more objective should access that) I really do think that this difference is one of the more important one's concept wise. Aventus did propose a quite intuitive revenue sharing structure in their white paper for the secondary market (so that the original seller would also profit from the sales on the secondary market) GUTS currently only lets people sell their ticket for the original price (the fact that we currently do this is again more operational, but still give credit where credit is due - it is a cool idea that also inspired us in a way)

That being said, I encourage any initiative that strives to make the ticketing market more fair and transparent. It would be a 'scarcity mindset' to presume that there is only room for one blockchain based ticketing solution. Ticketmaster sells more than 500 million tickets a year (http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6890347/live-nation-2015-earnings-7-6-billion-revenue) and has a yearly revenue of more than 7 billion US dollars (in 2015) Competition (especially blockchain based solutions) will keep us sharp and innovative, in the end it all about execution and we sure as hell are ready for it  

As mentioned you can verify everything I said by visiting our blog on Medium (https://blog.guts.tickets/), try out our Sandbox(https://sandbox.guts.tickets/) or research the 'realness/seriousness' of our clients for yourself! If you have any questions let me know.

Through our smart ticketing application! What you see are the ownership changes as registered by our smart ticketing contract.

As for which event the tickets were sold for, it is a Jochem Myjer comedy show (we blogged about this show: https://blog.guts.tickets/announcement-ticket-sale-of-new-jochem-myjer-show-in-doetinchem-fd027841d990 I am not able to provide you with a link to the ticket sale yet because it was was an invite only ticket sale for members of the theatre in Doetinchem. After offering the tickets to the members the tickets will be offered/available to the public. Looking at the contract only 200 of the 700 tickets have been sold as of now, so probably the remaining +-500 will be sold publically in a few days. I'll drop a link to the public ticket sale in this thread as soon it goes live (it will sell out in minutes btw) The secondary market sales will be registered by the same contract, so even after the show is sold out on the primary market the ownership changes between consumers will be shown as well.

If you want to buy a free ticket of your own please visit https://sandbox.guts.tickets/ we sell free smart ticket over there. The ownership changes of these tickets are by the way also registered on chain (you can visit your Rinkby testnet wallet if you create an account on our smart ticketing application!) Let me know if you have any questions!

Hi nonokeci! My apologies for the somewhat late reaction to your comment. Like others already mentioned in the thread, GUTS has been around for quite some time(founded mid-2016) now and has a live and operational product with paying customers. You can read all about in on our blog: https://blog.guts.tickets/ As an operational ticketing company with real clients to please and events to monitor we don't have the luxury of creating marketing smoke about our ICO around the clock (like all the other more conceptual phase ICO teams that you may be used to) Creating a proof-of-concept or wire-frame is a lot different from having a product that is used by real consumers in the ticketing space. A large part of the complexity in this industry shows itself in the operational phase / real consumer interaction phase.
 
We, of course, are aware that marketing is important for the confidence of the public in our concept and team, in upcoming works you'll hear more about our latest product additions and partners. So be sure to stick around  

Hi there Burntsnow, my apologies for this somewhat late reply. We have been quite busy the last weeks with an important verification and ticket sale event. But now that most of the client feedback from these events is handled GUTS will have a lot more development power available to interact with the community! We are certainly looking forward to it.

Concerning your white list question, if you are on the white list you should receive an email every week with updates/news about the GET-protocol ICO. As also mentioned earlier we'll be using a customized version of our smart ticketing application to streamline the ICO process. Contributors on the white list will receive an email with the instruction how to acquire a smart ticket for the ICO.  This smart ticket will serve the white listed a unique contributor address.

By using our own tested and operational smart ticketing application for the ICO we'll be able to showcase our tech as well as be certain that scammers can't duplicate our front-end to scam contributors (as the smart ticketing application is server-side)

Hi Hellomot! Wat leuk dat je donderdag naar Jochem Myjer gaat,  dan ga je zeker een paar van onze medewerkers tegen het lijf lopen om je kaartje te scannen:)

De ICO (dus het moment dat wij mensen GET kunenn gaan bemachtigen) gaat pas in Oktober plaatsvinden, details hierover gaan we zeerzeker prijsgeven. Wanneer je jezelf op onze ICO-website voor de Slack (of Whitelist) inschrijft dan zulen we je een bericht sturen zodra we hier meer over weten. Momenteel zijn we heel druk met de kaartverkoop & vervolgens de show van morgen, zoals al eerder aangegeven hebben we heel veel nieuwe functies ontwikkeld de laatste (en uitvoerig getest uiteraard, het gaat allemaal gegarandeerd werken) Zodra deze twee events achter de rug zijn gaat er meer focus naar de ICO!

Waarschijnlijk gaan we binnenkort ook een topic/thread openen over het GET-protocol in deze Nederlandse sectie van bitcointalk, want we hebben al gemerkt dat we ontzettend veel Nederlandse steun hebben en staan jullie maar al te graag te woord:)

Veel plezier bij de show donderdag!

Best I can do is an autograph;)

Really soon! We are working on it now:)

Good to hear you aboard and like what we have planned and what we are allready making happen! I am not sure when you exactly white listed yourself, but if it was fairly recent you might have missed the email we sent out to all our Slack requesters/white listers. As this may message is relevant for all people interested in this project I'll add it to this bitcointalk thread as well.

---

Thank you for your interest in the GET-protocol ICO. We have received your white list request in good order.
 
We have decided to postpone publishing specifics concerning the ICO until September 1. The reasoning behind this decision is that the GUTS development team is currently too occupied with deadlines concerning an upcoming ticket sale. During this ticket sale, another big Jochem Myjer theatre show, important new features of the ticket application will be pushed to production. Recently developed features as the live sales dashboard for the event organizers (Hekwerk in this case),  the seating algorithm and load balancing improvements will be put to the test. Also, in upcoming days, GUTS will be monitoring a rather important smart ticket verification event (these tickets were sold on 9 July, the ticket trade of both the primary and the secondary market can be observed on the blockchain: etherscan)

As we believe that developing, new features, testing our application and making our customers happy is crucial to the success of the ICO as well, we find that postponing opening the direct message channels is beneficial for everyone involved with the project.

If you have questions about the protocol please fire away publically at our bitcointalk announcement thread, we have nothing to hide. For the latest news and information about the protocol follow our Medium blog. For specific questions, you can email us at ico@guts.tickets.

Kind regards,

GUTS Tickets

We completely agree with that Slack is bot-hell and overall unsafe for use during an ICO. The Slack will only be used in the weeks right before the ICO, a short time before the ICO goes live we will switch to a self-hosted solution like Rocket.Chat after which the Slack will be locked.  We are also considering a telegram group. Thanks for the interest! We'll speak soon!

Very soon! We'll update the thread immediately and blog about it of course ourblog!

We currently very busy with development due to an upcoming ticket sale. After this important event (we are testing very crucial newly developed functions like a live dashboard for the event organizer and a seating algorithm)  If this event has passed, we will have more team members available to build the community more. But we are happy with our current trajectory, we knew there were a few disadvantages to being a company that has a working product and customers. But we do believe it is also our biggest strength. We appreciate the support!

Thanks for the compliment!

This is a very good question and frankly a very important one. Therefore my answer will be a bit long!

The current system you observe in the sandbox and see in the screencaps in the original announcement is currently live and used by GUTS, a ticketing company. GUTS could, in essence, for the cost reduction reasons you mention yourself go without the blockchain registration without really losing the key benefits of this system.  Going for a 'native' database registration by GUTS would make the system less transparent for consumers as GUTS could make these state-changes unavailable for the public or could (in theory) present false state-change data. This lack of transparency is what causes a lot of problems observed in the market at the present moment. With companies as Ticketmaster owning secondary ticketing markets and more sketchy business models that are allowed to exist due to this darkness/lack of transparency.

So up until now, I haven't explained why a blockchain is necessary to solve the problems in this industry, only why it would be 'nice' to have one. This is obviously not strong enough of an argument to go to market. So let's get into the real reason we need the blockchain and why the market will move towards a blockchain solution. First of all, it is important to distinguish the difference between GUTS Tickets (the ticketing company)  and the GET-protocol, the protocol that will be run by an independent foundation/entity and that will build the open protocol for other ticketing companies to use so not only for ticketing company GUTS. GUTS will use the protocol as well but as just another ticketing company. By being an underlying protocol/API this initiative can scale quickly as existing ticketing companies with there existing clients can implement the GET-protocol and add smart ticket features without changing a lot of their business model and 'front-end'.

So in a sense, the blockchain is needed because it enables the smart ticket solution described and tested in the market by ticketing company GUTS to scale. The protocol will create wallets for every unique user (currently we verify by SMS, but we are researching other unique-ness measures, like social logins but also decentral identity solutions like CIVIC) With this unique account tied to the user they will still always have the same wallet address even if you are buying a ticket in a different country or from a different event organizer. For consumers this would mean they would only need one verified account with the GET-protocol, that has an ethereum wallet connected to it, to buy tickets with every event-organizers or ticketing company worldwide. Pretty cool. Apart from the standardization aspect the blockchain provides, there is the role of the GET and its distribution/economy of the token in the event ticketing value chain. Transferring the tokens among these actors also requires a blockchain, as you well know. Especially as it is our roadmap to eventually cover the whole value of the ticket instead of only the transaction costs. This would greatly reduce the transaction and processing costs in FIAT/crypto conversion that currently are present in the secondary market.  More on the tokens role in this system can be found in the white paper.

So that is the fundamental reason we believe that blockchain is the solution to the problems in this industry. But we also believe that apart from solving the problems in the industry this protocol can actually add a whole new layer to the event experience. Currently, an event ticket is just a QR code on a piece of paper / on your phone. But with this tech + the blockchain, it can be much more. Beverage and drink tokens that belong to a certain event-organizer can be added to a wallet and used the next time you visit the event of this organizer! Or these beverage tokens can be transferred to your friends via the GET-protocol wallet etc. The days of entering an event with a piece of paper and buying plastic coins is over:)

I hope this answer is sufficient, I may have to edit it a bit as I am in a bit of a hurry. But I think the overall message is clear. In upcoming weeks we will add more information about our roadmap and future rollout plans of the protocol GUTS is a company that is live in the market with a ticket application and real event-organizers using our service. As such the team has their hands full with development tasks to make these customers happy. We have a big ticket sale coming up in a week after this more developer time will be available to put our future plans for the protocol into writing and tell you guys more about the ICO. I would strongly recommend reading our white paper in the mean time!