The EU is digging its own grave.
Not long now and it should fail… hopefully
I made a quick first reading pass through the latest satanic EU thing. It's a wide ranging 324 page document, covering things like trusts, football clubs, dubious / tax optimized jurisdictions, the distinction between in house lawyers and law firms, beneficial ownership, reporting requirements, etc, etc.
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6220-2024-REV-1/en/pdf
I tried to collect the bits that might impact Bitcoin. A minuscule fraction of the paper surface area. It's not like Bitcoin or even 'virtual assets' has its own chapter: in classic design-by-commission it just pops up in random articles.
Notably I'm ignoring cash: someone else will have to save that. But beware that 'cash' is defined much more broadly than the word suggests. It doesn't explicitly cover bitcoin, but I would expect that to happen eventually.
The first 100 pages (items numbered up to 103) seem more like an introduction than actual proposed law. Some of it seems to oversell the actual legal text.
One observation is that 'virtual asset service provider' (VASP, or what Americans would roughly call custodians and exchanges) is now considered a Financial Institution(tm).
My impression now is that only _custodians_ are not allowed to:
1. Have anonymous customers (i.e. anonymous accounts): they explicitly mandate KYC rugging existing accounts, albeit with a 3+ year heads up
2. Operating a mixer
They also need to verify ownership of destination address (wallet verification), which is bad, but far from a ban on self-custody.
The 'intro' text mentions mixers along with anonymous coins in a way that suggests banning transactions with them. But the word 'through' makes it really unclear what they mean. In the law text they define 'anonymity-enhancing coins' in a way that obviously implies Monero and Zcash in that order. Article 58 uses the vague term 'through' again. Does it mean they can't let you withdraw to it? Or just that they're not allowed to offer a pseudo-mixing service that *uses* these coins.
Anyway I'll have to re-read this a few times to grok. Keeping in mind that the politicians who wrote this don't have the brain cells to process anything more sophisticated than "monero bad, make law with fancy words!" and then the bureaucrats who write the law have no idea what anything means either. No tech literate person was involved in this process, that's very obvious from the language. But that does make it less dangerous.
The next step for me is more deeply understand what the proposal actually says, if there's any potential direct impact on myself (which might give me legal standing - now or in five years or so when stuff has really taken effect and local judges can intervene) or if it's merely bad in general (in which case perhaps all I can do is write an angry letter). 
Discussion
Don't count on that. 99% of the population does not give a fuck about privacy. Probably 80% doesn't truly care about democracy, they merely have a preference for it. Freedom has always been a minority obsession and fight.
Which means, it will the state(s) still a great deal of pain to wake people up and small dissenters will be the first to die.
Hopefully not.
Hopefully there's a much larger slice of the population which has legitimate interest in removing constraints from their lives, increase their savings, have better futures for their families. Sounds like there's a small majority of the population that just doesn't know what to do and where to look.
Here @freddynew’s take on it on X fwiw 
I still don’t understand how lightning payments would be affected. I think this is just clueless garbage from EU bureaucrats that think they can stop bitcoin. But it will just have the opposite effect
They wouldn't be. But let's say you buy Bitcoin and then open a channel. You might get annoying compliance question, because they can't surveil you anymore. They might close your account. This can lead to self-censorship.
In that sense lightning has similar properties "anonimity-enhanced" coins. Which is good! (plus politically speaking, it's hard for them to argue against "I use it because it's cheaper and faster, it just happens to also be more private")
The self-censorship is already happening but thats also with my fiat bank account. I minimised the use of my bank accounts since they started asking insane KYC/AML questions. I was shocked and couldn’t believe what I read. Now my bank accounts are at ~0 and the banks are starting to beg me to make deposits with pathetic offers! The next banking crisis is near. Banks are NGMI.
It stops business adoption.
Adoption might get impacted temporarily, but I agree with nostr:npub13l3lyslfzyscrqg8saw4r09y70702s6r025hz52sajqrvdvf88zskh8xc2 ‘s take here 