So, every single word you write on the blockchain is public and available to everyone, right? Sure, but it doesn't have to be that way. If you wanted to you could gain more privacy than you could ever imagine from a centralized entity while also maintaining the blockchain's ability to make transactions corruption and tamper resistant.
Privacy has always been a major talking point with regards to internet security and often the owners of centralized web applications have been critiqued for their use of user data and mining and selling that data in order to make money.
This lack of ownership over one's personal content has lead to blockchain experiments like Steem. Paying individuals for their content rather than strictly trading access to a web application for personal data. That doesn't appear to be such a great deal since that data can then be used against you in targeted advertising.
But everything (so far) on the blockchain appears publicly for all to mine. Individuals might be paid a little better and their content can't be taken down, but anyone can see what they write. Which is fine if you don't care, but a lot of people care about some of the content they produce. Anyone can look at your entire comment history and use that against you.
Luckily, we already have keys that we can use to encrypt our information whenever we want to. You want to send a private message to a single individual on the blockchain? Simply encrypt the message with their public key and ship it off on the blockchain. Only they will be able to unlock it. And nobody can erase it.
So private messaging on the blockchain is straight-forward, but what about a group of people? You can't encrypt messages with an individual public key, but you can with a group public key that everybody shares. The hard question is how to get everyone in the group a corresponding private key.
If you trust a single individual, that person can make both group keys and make the public key readily available and individually message the people in the group with the private key. Although, now you have to trust everyone in the group not to share the key. There's a lot of trust in this scenario, but it allows us to enable private group communication.
There are more complex mechanisms you can use to minimize trust and increase security within the group, but I won't go into implementation in order to keep this article at a reasonable length and technical level.
There are plenty of applications that could benefit from such private communications on a public blockchain that preserves these transactions forever. That's something that makes a blockchain of content actually worthy of money. Meaningful transactions of content that can be delivered to necessary parties without the fear of transactions being intercepted or read.
The most obvious application is private messaging. But thinking outside of the box in terms of messaging and content, such transactions could be used in games that hide information from certain users at certain periods of time.
Anyways that's all I have to say tonight. I would love to see someone utilize this capability in some manner as I find that it might make the "end product" more attractive to users. Or you could delegate to a voting bot. It doesn't matter to me. My ideas are free and open sourced. For the "community".
