I have been thinking a lot about what the future could look like if Hive grows to be one of the biggest Web3 platforms and one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies. It's an exciting idea especially because we are all early adopters, but the more that I imagine it, the more I feel like privacy features are going to be essential.
There are a lot of ways for large corporations, organizations, and government agencies to take advantage of Hive's transparency to control people. Everyone having an account that they use for both social media and financial transactions is almost the perfect way for them to do it.
Algorithms will analyze every transaction. Every account will have a credit score and a social credit score. In fact, there will probably be MANY social credit scores assigned to each account by various organizations and governments. They will be calculated by algorithms and you may or may not even be aware of them, but they will affect your life.
When you pay for your meal at a steak house with HBD from your Hive account, your "animal rights" score will go down. When you write a Hive post advocating for free speech, a pro-liberty organization will increase your "freedom" score, but authoritarian governments will lower your "obedience" score. Donating to a controversial political candidate or organization could have a huge effect on multiple scores.
Insurance companies will determine their risk based on these scores when they determine how much to charge you. Employers will use these scores when deciding whether to hire you. Landlords will use them to decide whether to rent to you. Governments could even use them to determine your tax rate or restrict certain rights if your scores indicate that you haven't behaved the way they want you to.
The result of this is a world where you have to be careful about every action you take and everything you say.
There are already various privacy coins that let people transact privately without the transparency of blockchains like Bitcoin. You could trade some of your Hive for one of them in order to make private transactions, but it would be a lot better if that wasn't necessary.
It should be possible to make a side-chain where transactions can be made in a way that obscures the details of who is sending funds to who. You can think of it kind of like swapping Hive for Swap.Hive on Hive-Engine. You would deposit Hive ahead of time to get credit on the privacy layer. Then you would make an encrypted transaction on the Hive chain that would tell the privacy layer to send Hive from your credit to the account you want to send funds to.
The solution to making posts private might have to involve side-chains too. We already have the ability to send encrypted memos on the base layer of Hive, but that is only for sending a transaction to a single person. If we wanted a solution that allows you to post photos of your children that can only be seen by your friends and family (for example) then that is more complicated.
I want to hear what other people think about this. There are so many advantages to Hive and owning your account here. This is just an issue that sticks out to me as something that will need to be considered before Hive can replace Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, MasterCard, etc.
