The aim of the paper is to present some of the general principles of data protection law that can be applied to automated decision-making built on blockchain-based data processing in order to comply with the provision of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The analysis focuses on the applicability of the ‘data protection by design’ principle during the development of such systems. My hypothesis is that because blockchain-based networks are built on distributed data processing operations, therefore data controlling or processing of participating nodes should comply with some abstract data protection patterns predetermined and collectively built-in during the system’s development phase. For the sake of better understanding, I presented the human mind and its ‘uploading’ with conscious and unconscious content as an analogy to blockchain-based AI systems. My goal is to highlight that the fusion of blockchain and machine learning-based AI can be a suitable technology to develop serious automated decision-making systems (so-called ‘distributed AI’). The compliance of these distributed AI systems with data protection law principles is a key issue regarding the very serious risks posed by them.