I've seen a couple of articles pop up with the headline that you see in my title. According to a report by Cyphertrace, 1.7 billion USD worth of cryptocurrency was stolen in 2018.
The report explicitly mentions that many countries are ramping up their KYC requirements..
This is what will happen in the coming days; crypto-exchanges asking for more invasive and in-depth KYC requirements in compliance with their governments' orders. It already started here in the Philippines when a local exchange asked for details like source of funds and other in-depth stuff regarding a user's capability to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies which to me is just scary. Decentralized exchanges could be the way to go, but I'm pretty sure that even such platforms would be invaded by the governments' regulations and laws.
..and in the report Lightning Network is added to the 'top 10 cryptocurrency threats'.
Seems like we could soon see regulations implemented that make it illegal to send/receive cryptocurrency anonymously. At least, that's the sort of feeling I'm getting after reading the entire report.
Most countries are looking to implement forced compliance by 2020 at the very latest.
Day by day, it seems like cryptocurrencies are slowly being stripped off of its identity. Governments wanting to remove the anonymity aspect of crypto for it to be totally transparent is not a good thing. Off-chain scaling is a solution proposed to give the main 'highway' of transactions breathing room, albeit the main 'highway' not really being congested at all times. LN
could go, but bitcoin's anonymity shouldn't (not that I'm against LN, but apparently bitcoin is fine without it.)