Nowadays I often see people mentioning how steem is good as a mean of payment and that it would be uber cool to pay for things via your upvotes (since it's basically free).

For instance @fredrikaa or @acidyo.

So it got me thinking what would it take to actually be able to pay via upvotes ?

source : canva

How you would buy coffee with upvotes :

Your wake up and get ready to go to work, once outside you go to starbucks to buy your morning coffee. It costs 2$, you look up your phone, fire up the application.
You have 2.3$ of credit left in it. Nice. You ask for your favorite brew, give your name, watch the barista make a horrible mistake in it, shrug and wait.

"2$ please" she asks, you show your phone with the application running, she understands, types a few things on a tablet and then show you a qr code. You scan it, wait a few seconds, the tablet makes a satisfactory ding and you see the receipt machine spit out a piece of paper.

You get your coffee, and go to work. Once there you start the day by filling your starbucks account. go to the application, you already entered your posting key when setting up the application so you just have to decide how much you want to put in.

You hit 6$, it tells you that it will cost you 15% voting power, you confirm and get to work. After a few minutes you get a message notifying you that the votes were a success and in 12 hours you'll get your money on the application. You smile and sip your "free" coffee. You think to yourself :

This is great.

What just happened ? First let's talk about the problems that comes with paying with upvotes.

Problems :

• When you upvote you can be an asshole and remove that upvote (although you're not getting your voting power back)
• People flagging your upvotes
• The value of that upvote may (and almost certainly will) fluctuate.
• The merchant you pay don't get 100% of the value of the upvote used to pay for things, since part of it will be locked in steem power rewards and send in curation rewards.
• An upvote isn't instantaneous, it takes 7 days for it to reach it's payout time. You're not waiting 7 days for you coffee.
• If your upvote is worth 1$ and you want to buy something at 5 $ you're going to have to cast several upvotes which may be counter intuitive.

Solutions :

The idea is to have an application with some money on it, which already exists so it's not too hard to tap into this. To add credit to it, you simply tell how much money you want to put and depending on your steem power, it'll cast x upvotes to credit the money.

In the backend there is a bot that posts one new comment every 20 seconds (blockchain limitation) that will get upvoted so you always upvote a comment that's the closest to payout. (Once you cross 12 hours before payout you can't upvote a post anymore). This means three things :

• This leaves almost no time for someone to flag your upvote
• The chances of your upvote value fluctuating is low
• The time between your upvote and cashout is really low. compared to waiting 7 days.

After 12 hours, the sbd is converted to dollars and you are credited the money.

The last issue is : what do we do with the steem power ?

Several choices :

• It simply goes to starbucks which can then use it to promote various things
• Starbucks can count how much steem power you gave them and then give a bonus upvote on top of yours to boost your deposit.
• They could power it down and give it back to you after 13 weeks but I doubt it's really the best way to go.

As you can see this solves all the problems above.

One issue is that now you need to have apps for each store where you want to pay with upvote so what if instead of depositing to x store's app, you deposit it to a card like tenx ?

Now you can pay for everything, everywhere with upvotes.

Thanks for reading, please tell me what you think in the comments :)