Thinking about privacy

What if there was a way to selectively reveal your profile to certain users. Optionally, if they are logged in and you have added them as a friend. Then if someone friends you they would be revealing their profile to you. Some blogs could be public, some friends only.

Perhaps the only thing you see at a bare minimum is the username. Then the various tabs like blog or all posts, replies and comments could be unselected or selected to reveal to certain users, all users on a list, or various communities. Who you follow, who follows you, these things like on web2 sites people are familiar with, allow you to hide certain info.

It would change the dynamic of the entire community to switch from a public ledger to a private ledger. There are arguments for or against this, but I would like the choice of privacy by default, then the ability to selectively allow certain users or dapps access.

Perhaps a 'please stop this user from following me' option. That might be hard to do on the chain level, might be something to consider for HF26. This also opens up too many other questions about what the ramifications of a change like that would be. This is why I am throwing this idea out there for Hive to consider. Privacy might leave holes in charts making metrics difficult to track, but as Hive gets bigger with more and more users we should put the power in the users hand. There could be a signature request board where incoming requests for info could sit pending until the users says yes I will show you my posts. Collections that you have up for purchase / subscription / lease could be authorized once you accept the payment like collecting pending rewards.

I know that we are all using a public permissionless block chain but I think a lot about privacy. You wouldn't just broadcast your bank account, but with Bitcoin and Hive you do. On Hive you also share a lot of information and that is valuable but also yours. If we are going to charge users HBD for products, NFTs and services then it would also be reasonable to charge for access to for instance, a special collection of blogs you have curated or created, like a course or a book. The option to 'private' a post could be setting a small paywall like read this article for 0.1 HBD, with a short preview of the first paragraph.

Access could be subscription based and able to be revoked, or one time and permanently given access. If someone makes 12 payments and reaches the full amount they could own access via a token and that token could be transferred, trading access of certain digital materials on chain with another user, or leasing it to others by delegating that token.

There are advantages to an open permission less blockchain, but privacy also matters.

If Hive were to add more privacy features I would be interested in an option to reveal or encrypt certain information. I know this probably isn't an easy thing to do, but is it worth it?

Should Hive develop more privacy features where information such as wallet balance or transactions can be selectively revealed to certain users only? I like to have choices. This might add unnecessary bloat to the chain, unless there was another type of privacy solution we could integrate. These are just ideas that may or may not be possible.

@howo @blocktrades @aggroed @neoxian @themarkymark @klye @khaleelkazi
Tell me if I am way off the target with what is possible
or if there are any ideas here that are worth discussing.

Recently there was a call for someone who can write an Ethereum contract to handle zec assets. There are plenty of smart developers here on Hive that I thought maybe someone may be interested in answering this call. ( "We need a smart-contract on Ethereum that only accepts RenZEC (and ETH to pay for transactions), and needs confirmation from two out of three members to spend those RenZEC tokens." Thread)