How To Pay For Stuff By Upvoting It

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I think it was @acidyo who once mentioned how cool it would be to be able to pay for a hamburger by upvoting it. I find the concept extremely cool as well. There is nothing particularly mind-bendingly difficult to the idea at a conceptual level. After all, what upvoting does is direct freshly minted SBD/STEEM and/or SP from the reward pool towards an account.

The problem with paying for stuff by upvoting them is, of course, the seven-day payout window. Forcing a customer to spend a week at the cash register at a McDonald's until the end of the payout window is a bit too much to ask. It also goes without saying that trusting the customer not to take back his upvote is a non-starter.

There are several ways to work around the problem, each involving varying degrees of centralization/decentralization. One way to solve it is to use a centralized payment processor as a trusted middleman between the Steemian and the merchant. The payment processor could operate a series of bots the Steemian could delegate Steem Power to. The bot would be trusted by the merchants to upvote posts each representing the products put up for sale (as requested by a delegator) and not pull away their upvotes in the middle of the payout period. The payment processor could require its Steemian users to transfer a sum equaling a week's worth of voting power delegated to the processor by them as collateral in case they try and cheat by pulling away their delegation while their upvotes for products purchased by them are still not paid out by the blockchain, yet.

Another way to solve the problem is to use an SMT or a token created with Steem-Engine that has a much shorter payout window, say, three seconds long (equaling the processing time of one block on the Steem blockchain). There could be another token for controlling the inflation pool of that token that could be used to pay for stuff by upvoting. For convenience, the liquid token (and SMT or a Steem-Engine token) could be pegged to a fiat currency like SBD is pegged to the US dollar - only with more sophisticated methods and having sufficient STEEM as collateral.