Hi guys,

Everyday creative, helpful and valuable content is created on steem blockchain. But to reward the authors you need to be in the steem ecosystem. What if you're not?

This is something that @techslut addressed in her post few days ago. She proposed a voting bot, that would accept bidding (or just payments) in other currencies than Steem and SBD. The idea is that if you're not on steemit, but you found a post that you want to reward, you send your Bitcoin or any other (crypto)currency to the voting bot and the bot rewards the author for your (with the vote).

The payment could be done using an image in the post that is a link to a payment processor (like @blocktrades) where user only sends his payment and it's automatically "translated" to a vote to his post. Seems kinda hard to do, especially since there's not many crypto there that are good for micropayments (besides bitshares and steem of course). Plus the middleman would have to take a very little fee, if any. But I think it's doable, it just needs experienced devs: @minnowbooster, @booster, @buildwhale - something for your guys ;)

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The Bitcoin Lightning Network

I would like to propose an alternative, or maybe complementary feature.

Let's start with the crypto with widest adoption - Bitcoin. Not very good for micropayments. Slow transactions, big fees - meh. But there is a solution on the horizon, it's already working on the testnet and it's called Lightning Network. I know it's controversial, many believe it will not work, but if it does:

• great solution for micropayments, fast and cheap
• most known crypto, the best chance that the user who wants to send reward already has some BTC
• great for publicity - first social network to incorporate LN
• great for publicity 2x - steem is so big that now it can incorporate BTC

As for the voting bot part - instead of buying vote, the user who wants to reward the author may just send it to him. The payment processor would change the BTC to Steem on the fly and the rewarded author would receive fresh new Steem directly into his wallet.

LN is probably very tricky to make it work, it still operates only on BTC testnet but if steem devs could incorporate it into the steemit website in 2018 - that would be huge in my opinion.

Cheers!