Why is blockchain transparency not considered major privacy issue? (newbie)

Question

Everyone can view all transactions in the blockchain. While the accounts are anonymous, they are not secret and I can't imagine it would be too hard to figure out and publicize some of those whose privacy matters most to them. Also if I buy something from you, you give me your account #, from now on I can follow your account on the block chain and keep track of every transaction that involves your account, can't I? What am I missing here?

Answer 1

There is a difference between anonymity and pseudo anonymity. The blockchain is pseudonymous. If a malicious actor wanted to hide his activity from the blockchain - he would use a blockchain that uses zero-knowledge proof and not something like Bitcoin, there would be ways for actors to avoid liability even with an on-chain transaction record.

Answer 2

Conceptual: As per my understanding, it's the scalability. The larger the blockchain is, the more secure it is since searching something abstract is even tough.

Also, since many protocols provides services of fast data fetching from the main chains, it's like a trade of some security concerns with speed or lesser latency.

Technical: Transactions are stored off chain and their merkle root hash is stored on-chain. This roots are hashes and are quite secure.

Answer 3

Interesting, but a speculative question. Some thoughts:

• A user can have A lot of addresses (wallets) with no connection to each other, and use them for different purposes.
• Deanonymizing is something that is not quite easy to achieve due to the previous point.
• Usually, people find it OK, if somebody follows their account. DeBank for example makes it much simpler.
• Some people want to be followed, they attract attention to NFTs and Tokens.
• Data Openness is the greatest feature, otherwise, Projects won't gain trust at all.
• Privacy-concerned users are of two types: public vs regulators. As said previously, you can try to find some ways to prevent being publicly deanonymized, but if somebody wants to hide his soul from a regulator, maybe it is fine, that this is not quite easy to do on that level.