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$, it tells you that it will cost you 15% voting power, you confirm and get to work. After a few minutes you get a message notifying you that the votes were a success and in 12 hours you'll get your money on the application. You smile and sip your "free" coffee. You think to yourself :
What just happened ? First let's talk about the problems that comes with paying with upvotes.
Problems :
- When you upvote you can be an asshole and remove that upvote (although you're not getting your voting power back)
- People flagging your upvotes
- The value of that upvote may (and almost certainly will) fluctuate.
- The merchant you pay don't get 100% of the value of the upvote used to pay for things, since part of it will be locked in steem power rewards and send in curation rewards.
- An upvote isn't instantaneous, it takes 7 days for it to reach it's payout time. You're not waiting 7 days for you coffee.
- If your upvote is worth 1$ 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 ?
Thanks for reading, please tell me what you think in the comments :)
That's true, but there is still the possibility that someone with a lot of SP writes a bot that always downvotes such a comment that is close to payout (even within the 12 hour limit), so the vendor is not guaranteed to receive the money, which makes it always risky for them to offer such a service.
I mean I find the idea quite nice, but in practice there are also not that many people who can pay for even simple things like a $2 coffee with an upvote. If we want to bring Steem into the "real world" of payments, I guess memos are the way to go.
Yes but why would you do that ? I mean it's a huge waste of voting power. And if they start doing that it's fairly easy to migrate the system to another account, imagine if you have 10-20 accounts to handle creating comments all the time, the bot won't be able to keep up either in terms of voting power or in terms of votes per minute.
The vendor is not guaranteed to recieve the money but they add money to the account only once they get the payout, if the money fluctuate/gets flagged then the end user simply receives less money onto his account. There is 0 risks for the vendor.
Yes it's not a system that's for minnows, or they would have to load up the account over the course of several days to actually be able to spend money on it.
I aggree that it's obvious that this system is complicated for a task that's relatively system in the cryptocurrency world aka sending money to buy things.
But here the idea is to pay with your voting power instead of steem/sbd which is an unique feature of steem so I thought of how we would be able to do this without resorting to self voting and then waiting a week to send the resulting sbd to buy what we want.
I have to ask for a clarification here: does the user upvote using his own account or is he delegating SP to an account of the vendor, which then does the upvote?
In both cases you are right, an attack on the systems is a waste of voting power. But in the first case if someone wants to disturb the whole process, he just deploys a bot that only targets comments that have a high payout (since the comment closest to the payout can be upvoted by many people) or creates an army of bot dedicated to downvoting comments with high payouts.
In the second case the attacker would have to flag comments, that have been recently upvoted and adjust the downvote to the amount of money he wants to deny the vendor.
I know that in both cases the attacker has to invest quite some money first respectively hold a lot of SP.
Good question: e.g. competitors, who want to diminish the reward of a vendor or "modern day Robin Hoods" [1]. My point here is that if something is possible in principle there will always be people that find a reason to (ab)use this system.
The idea of using this unique feature of Steem is indeed a very good one, but since it is not that straight-forward it opens up new attack vectors to mess with the system.
[1] As far as I understood the money from flagging goes back into the reward pool and is so available for everyone, a "modern day Robin Hood" could do this in order to steal from the rich to give it to the poor. If my notion of this is wrong, please correct me.
the user upvote using his own account
As for the attack, we upvote comments that are seconds from being in the "no more vote" zone, so if we manage this correctly, we can probably cast a vote within three seconds of the zone, which leaves no time at all for the attacker because he has to wait for the next block (3 seconds) to see that you upvoted the comment, and by that time, it's already too late. It's a bit tricky for a human, but a bot can definitely do it.
Which means that they have to flag the comments before they are voted on. So they have to flag it while being "blind" aka they don't know how much flag percent they must use to negate the deposit. Which means that if starbucks has 100 accounts, they have to flag all of these accounts all the time to make sure that they hurt deposits.
Them being blind also means that the system can see those flags and make the user vote on flag-free comments. So the vendor can easily scale the commenting system for little cost by adding accounts while the flagger needs a tremendous amount of voting power to be able to cover them all with flags that actually hurt the reward.
Right now with more or less 2500 sp I can do 10 downvotes at 1$ per day. (downvotes actually cost more in steem power than an upvote but for simplicity's sake we'll suppose they cost the same)
So that's 250 sp per 1$ flag per day.
there are 86400 seconds in a day, so 86400/20 = 4320 comments per day.
If there is just one account and you wanted to downvote all the comments, by 1$ you'd need 1 080 000 sp. Which is more than 5.5M USD. And this is just removing 1$ from deposits. So you have to invest 5.5M to take away 4320 $ of deposits per day. Nothing that a big vendor can't cover.
But this is where this attack will get impractical, creating an account "costs" 3 steem (it is not destroyed, just powered up on the new account, so effectively it's free). Which means that for 300 steem, about 1500 bucks, you get a system that requires an attacker to have half a billion worth of steem.
Thus rendering this attack unscalable.
Well yes, your [1] is correct but in this instance they steal from the poor to prevent them to give to the rich :p
So you could call this "security by cost-effectiveness considerations" :D
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
You're very welcome ! Thank you for challenging the system, it helped me find and fix some flaws :p
That sounds like a potential Black Mirror episode.
ahahahahaa totally agree
Kinda everything sounds like one to be honest ^^
The first episode of the 3rd season is already closely related to this.
Love it! The Steem Coffee Bank App. I would be hopped up all over town on this!
So would I haha, imagine being like "oh I can upvote with 10$ so basically of of my meals are free from now on"
Let me upvote that cheeseburger for you!
you and @fredrikaa are spending wayyy too much time at starbucks, or at least posting about it :P
aside from that, love your ideas guys, i'm sure something great will come out of them ;)
ITS ALL ABOUT THAT COFFEE.
this might not be a good question, but i am always unaware about the fact that, a today the price of sbd is 7.5 USD, tomorrow it might be 10USD or 5 USD
how are we gonna cope with this fluctuation when we want to purchase some stuffs like coffee
sorry , if the question is not much of good, but I would appreciate to know about this
Not at all :) There are no bad questions.
Well since we would only wait 12 hours, this doesn't leave a lot of time for the average price to move. And if it does, then the deposited amount will simply change.
Great awesome wonderful post
Now the only thing is to be patient with growing your upvote power!
hey good idea, the problem are that 7 days is much time to pay
You red the article a bit too fast ;) there's a system to allow for your upvote to be converted to dollars/euros/whatever in 12 hours.
Seems like a cool concept I wonder will there be debit cards