> Thank you for your money and the data, we'll be in touch soon; pinky promise?
That's very much an option when it's something this popular - the Olympics I went to did an even more extreme version of that ("Thank you for putting in which events you wanted to see, your card may be charged up to x some time within the next month").
Or you can do it like plane seats: allocate 50k provisional tickets during the initial release (async but on a small timescale), and then if a provisional ticket isn't paid for within e.g. 3 days you put it back on sale.
Ultimately if it takes you x minutes to confirm payment details then you have to either take payment details from some people who then don't get tickets, or put some tickets back on sale when payment for them fails. But that's not really a scaling issue - you have the same problem trying to sell 1 thing to 5 people on an online shop.
That's very much an option when it's something this popular - the Olympics I went to did an even more extreme version of that ("Thank you for putting in which events you wanted to see, your card may be charged up to x some time within the next month").
Or you can do it like plane seats: allocate 50k provisional tickets during the initial release (async but on a small timescale), and then if a provisional ticket isn't paid for within e.g. 3 days you put it back on sale.
Ultimately if it takes you x minutes to confirm payment details then you have to either take payment details from some people who then don't get tickets, or put some tickets back on sale when payment for them fails. But that's not really a scaling issue - you have the same problem trying to sell 1 thing to 5 people on an online shop.