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:

• Charging tax (required in most businesses in the US)
• Dealing with the volatility of cryptocurrency
• Converting to Fiat
• Dealing with tax consequences with converting to Fiat

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.