Pay at the restaurant with Steem?
At the beginning of this week I met with two of my friends for dinner at one restaurant. During the course of the evening I was very bullish about Steem and even succeeded in creating their discounted accounts with some SP delegation. This should get them started.
As I was getting ready to leave, I payed the bill but before we parted I told them that in the future I would like to pay with Steem or even with an upvote at the restaurant.
Wouldn't it be nice?
I've been thinking about this for a while and today decided to formulate a theoretical solution to this challenge. Since I'm not a developer my ideas may be way off or just plain wrong so feel free to tell me this and your own ideas and improvements in the comments. So here we go.
First of all, the owner of the restaurant would need to create a special QR code on a sheet of paper, in the menu or in the visible place of the restaurant to present the customers with the option to pay with Steem or with an upvote.
When a customer would scan this QR code, it would direct the customer to their Steem profile where one could simply transfer Steem for the meal or a coffee to them. In order to be able to pay with an upvote, the owner of the restaurant would have to create an announcement post about this option to pay. Since after 7 days this post would stop collecting rewards, the restaurant could create a separate comment every day.
And so the customer would simply upvote this comment with the large enough upvote. Since now it's possible to get instant notifications using many different front-ends about upvotes, transfers and comments, the waiter would notice the upvote and the amount right away. In order to create a specific invoice for each customer, perhaps a waiter could even create a separate comment for each customer to upvote.
The biggest challenge today are low Steem prices to consider the upvote option but paying with Steem transfer would not be a problem because the exact amount can easily be adjusted. And by the way, the restaurant should calculate 75% author reward rate into the price of the upvote.
I imagine this could be possible even today without too much technical intervention. It's just a matter of finding a restaurant or a cafe owner who would like to play with this idea. Of course developers could develop a more seamless integration with a special device or a DApp at point of sale but it's a start and since everybody seems to carry smartphones today anyway, I think it's not at all complicated to pay this way.
Because if you present people with an option, quite often they take it. This way awareness of Steem could spread quite rapidly at least at that location.
What do you think? Would it work? What would you need to improve to make it work?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
The QR code has always been available. The problem is that businesses are not willing to take cryptocurrency for other reasons.
Paying with a vote assumes that STEEM users have enough value where their votes are worth a meal. for about 99.9% of us, that just isn't the case.
Put yourself into a business owner's shoes.
The obsticles to overcome are:
CoinBase solved this problem by acting as a intermediate exchange to handle these issues. First the business would set up a business account on CoinBase. The account would be set up to immediately "market" sell any incommoding cryptocurrency transaction to fiat on CoinBase exchange. Coinbase also offers deposits to banks and keeps track of deposits and exchanges for tax accounting. All this is automatic with CoinBase. The business never has to log into CoinBase to make the cryptocurrency-fiat trades.
The problem is that STEEM is not on CoinBase. There might be some other ways perhaps a little more complicated. I bet there are some people here smart enough to find or create a similar mechanism to move STEEM automatically to fiat OR to a stablecoin. @timcliff made a bounty to create a guide for multi-signature transactions and was very successful on solving the problem. Perhaps @timcliff can create another bounty to create a guide for businesses to automatically accept STEEM/SBD and then the currency is traded immediately and automatically for fiat or a stablecoin so the currency value becomes fixed until the business owner is ready to trade again or deposit into their banking solution.
This problem needs to be solved first. Then Steemians can use the guide to help the businesses get set up to accept STEEM.
Yes, @timcliff is playing a crucial role in this community!
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Thank you! Appreciate it very much!
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A very interesting idea.
I'm all up for SteemCommerce.
But the upvote option wouldn't work for a business as the value of the steem vote could change significantly between the point of vote and the point of payout.
Businesses would not be able to deal with level of uncertainly on their income.
Editor of the The State of Steem SoS Daily News.
Promoter of The State of Steem SoS Weekly Forums.
Editor of the weekly listing of steem radio shows, podcasts & social broadcasts.
Founder of the A Dollar A Day charitable giving project.
Yes, we need something more stable...
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Thank you so much for participating the Partiko Delegation Plan Round 1! We really appreciate your support! As part of the delegation benefits, we just gave you a 3.00% upvote! Together, let’s change the world!