Improving Steemit With Baby Steps Part 7: Upgrade @null
As you may or may not know, @null is where SBD goes to die. When you promote a post the money gets sent to @null and those coins get deleted on the next hard fork. I like this feature, but I think @null has a lot more potential than that.
My ultimate goal is to quit my job and make blockchain apps. Tinkering around with the Steem API has revealed some major limitations. First off, accounts are limited to 5 minutes between blog posts and 20 seconds between replies. This is obviously to stop bots from being able to spam thousands of people in a short amount of time. I was hoping to figure out a way to put information on the blockchain without it being a reply or blog post but have been unsuccessful. With any luck SMTs will fix this problem.
My current project is making games for Steem. Imagine trying to program a chess game but you can only perform an action every 20 seconds. Yeah, it's super annoying. Even the 3 second block time is extremely limiting and means no real-time app could ever run directly off this blockchain.
Back to the topic at hand, I was thinking @null could be used as a place where programmers/bots post to the blockchain without these limitations. Being able to post information to @null with only the account bandwidth limitation could be extremely useful. It would also be nice if some kind of permission system was set up so that the threads made @null could only be replied to by accounts that were allowed to. This way bots wouldn't be able to spam posts on other people's threads.
In conclusion, I think the @null account was a really good idea but is not living up to its full potential yet. I'm sure there are many valuable ways that it could be utilized.
Steemit Virtual Government
Part 1: The Vault
Part 2: Improved Filters
Part 3: Resteeming
Part 4: Hot and Trending Tabs
Part 5: Permanent Vesting
Part 6: Post Order Priority
That's how u gotta do it....plus...I feel steemit it him a do great on the social media trail
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Perhaps you can circumvent the 20 sec limitation by filling posts with more than just one post and storing the information in a buffer until it gets written into the blockchain. All you need is a page separator and then you can pretend the new post begins. It wouldn't really be compatible with Steemit because of the visuals, but for example if you build a chat, users could create an extra account with a letter combination before their username like @chat-edicted and then the app saves one post every minute for all messages sent by this user and also the same with his conversation partner @chat-doodlebear. To every message in the post you add references to the partial posts by adding the time stamp and a reference what and from whom came before and what after that specific partial post aka chat text follows. All you have to do is to teach your app how to access the right posts to show the conversation in the right sequence.
Or, you can do it via the wallet, which is probably the better way because if you add a # at the beginning of the memo, it will be invisible for others. Only the recipient can read it. The downside of the wallet method is that images and video cannot be added. For that, you could use the posting function, although, that content would be visible. A partial fix for that would be to anonymize this part and create one account for all image and video content. Although, that wouldn't change that everyone can see the pics. All they'd have to do is to look up the content of this one for all account.
Leaving away images and videos would be a loss, but creating a blockchain based chat app would surely be something.
It's hard to consolidate posts because I'm making a game where the next post depends on the previous one. Interesting concept though I like it.