In a centralized system, the central authority is the only one able to validate property rights, therefore it can maintain a certain level of privacy.

For example, if you have an account open at Barclays with 1,000 GBP in it, no one else except you and Barclays need to know that. Barclays does not give away its ledger with the account names and balances.

On the contrary, in a decentralized system, each node has access to the list of accounts (addresses) and is able to recompute all the current balances.

The ledger is public, therefore the privacy is gone.

Privacy is not to be mixed up with anonymity. Although lacking privacy, the blockchain is still anonymous in the sense that the public ledger is made of addresses behind which one or several individuals can hide.

Since the ledger is public, let’s look into who has the biggest wallet!

At the time of writing, it’s address 34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4Twseo containing 293,427 BTC, which amounts to a comfortable 10.6 billions USD equivalent (live update on this website among many others).