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.