My thoughts in this article are largely inspired by the Brave team and what they are trying to accomplish with decentralizing the advertising marketing and taking the profits back to the content creators.

What does it mean to own your data? It means that the content such as comments, posts and what you write on the internet are intrinsically linked to your online identity. If I post a picture with some text on Facebook, that data with the image and text is salted with my identifier, hashed and stored on to a smart contract on the blockchain. The blockchain publishing action would be done in the browser before the data even reaches Facebook servers. After the content hash is recorded onto a smart contract, the browser then encrypts your image/text data so that the full image and text can be human read-able only with the content hash. The request is then finally made to Facebook servers with your encrypted data. When Facebook is loading your content on other users’ News Feeds, Facebook performs a micro-transaction paying the smart contract where you stored your encrypted data to get the corresponding content hash. Facebook app then uses the content hash to decrypt the content data and renders the image/text.

To fetch a user’s content, Facebook made a micro-transaction to a smart contract where value is stored. At any time, the content creator can access the funds in the smart contract where he or she can take funds out of the contract when they are economically incentivized to do so (low gas prices, etc.).

Facebook would never agree to this model?

Is that really true? As the merchant that serves content, I believe Facebook deserves a share of the profit. How this model would work is explained in the following diagram:

I’m sure there are still loop holes in this model, please let me know what you all think. Thanks!