Today, I start my winter holidays, going home by train.
In this time every year, called spring travel, a special Chinese traveling phenomenon is happening, that besides students, most of employees working far away from their hometown go back by train, by bus or by air. So the traffic pressure is very large in this time. Especially, a train ticket is very hard to be bought, since the capacity of Chinese rail vehicles is not enough to satisfy so many people get home by train in the same period and the worst thing is that some people, being called Huang Niu Dang, a gang of people trading train tickets, get too many tickets. If you want to get tickets from Huang Niu Dang, you should add about at least RMB 50 per ticket. The most of tickets is seld out in the train station, Hence you have to buy tickets from Huang Niu Dang.
Many netizens suggest the Ministry of Railway print real name and ID number on the tickets and let out the franchise of selling tickets like air tickets. I think this is easy to do, because add two segment in the database can solve this problem, which cost 18 Bytes for ID number plus 30 Bytes for name ( 10 Chinese characters in UTF8), if 10 billion people times ticket is supposed, the data cost
(18+30)*10 000 000 000 Byte = 480GB which is only a piece of hard disk, a 500GB disk costing about RMB 600.
It spends about one minute for entering a name and ID number. If use the ID card reader, it costs several seconds. It may not cost much money.
So, Solving the Huang Niu Dang is not a hard thing, it Depends on the Ministry of Railway to do or not to do.