The European Union continues its march towards becoming a communist totalitarian nightmare. This absolutely does not solve anything, if at all it makes even a tiny dent is questionable. Yet it comes at a huge expense to the average citizen.

At some point I would not be surprised if a reward system is offered whereby you can report your friends and neighbours for their financial violations relating to lack of reporting and full transparency. 

The EU government has rolled out it's strict measures to fight privacy and freedom. Of course I support reasonable means adopted by the government to curb financial crimes but this shouldn't trample on individual rights to privacy and freedom. There is need for the government to consult with key players in the industry before such policies are made.

Banning anonymous payments will affect law abiding who are using these privacy coins for genuine purposes. Some people usually buy items privately or want to make an anonymous donation.

People living in the EU would have to start devising means of bypassing these restrictions. Some businesses and individuals might consider leaving that jurisdiction.

There was an article months ago about a lawmaker proposing wallets to collect data from its users which would mean even if you have a wallet that has not made a single transaction, you may still have to send KYC documents to the wallet developers. Privacy is just hard to achieve. If they are able to prevent users from using wallet, they might do it if MiCA says so.

It won't be long I think US will also be doing this to their citizens as well despite posing itself as cryptohub. Regulation could go to its full by mandating exchanges to report data to the government agencies like IRS.

Honestly, I don't understand how the European Union or any other institution could ban certain applications or cryptocurrencies. I say this given the decentralized design of these applications, thanks to the blockchain. They may be able to ban certain applications for non-compliance or force platforms to delist privacy coins, but that doesn't mean they've succeeded in limiting privacy on the network as they might imagine. Any European citizen can buy Monero, for example, from peer-to-peer platforms or even through social media, and with a little caution, they can evade these laws that restrict their freedom. These policies can only succeed if the authorities succeed in spying on all the devices of the entire population.

I don't want to know what they are up to for saying this, but am rest assured this stance might have changed before the said year, because people are getting to adopt the use of bitcoin the more and more policies are being put in place for the suitability of its existence, who knows maybe before then, they might also be among the top supporters for privacy coins, because i have learnt this over time, most people tend to fight against whatever they don't like or accept.

In Australia, Japan and South Korea, exchanges already do not support privacy coins, so I'm not surprised by the action of EU. With the way EU is tightening its grips on crypto, if they could make holding privacy coins in personal wallets illegal, I believe they would. They just want to make sure privacy coins go on extinction and even if they could achieve this, it won't make much difference because people will keep coming up with tools like tornado cash to make the supported ones untraceable.

Just because people were able to use cash, fiat to do illegal stuff, doesn't mean that we need to make it easier for them. Sure monero being banned or anything similar to monero, basically all privacy ones, being banned, doesn't mean that we are going to see them being easy.

We are seeing it make things easier for the criminals, and that is why it will be banned. Don't get me wrong, fiat, dollar, gold, bitcoin, anything could be used and being used, we are just talking about making it not so easier for them. In all those cases you can follow the trail, but when it is monero, then it is nearly impossible to follow and that is why they are getting banned. We need to make sure none of those happened, and you should be glad that we are getting rid of these.

Well this article of Cointelegraph and its title seem to mostly be a clickbait actually. Because those claims come from the interpretation of some regulatory texts by European Crypto Initiative (EUCI), written in a book, so it's not an official statement from european legal institutions as I understand fortunately.
Besides that, it doesn't seem to concern individuals, only platforms actually.

I don't see this as very bad news. After all, using DEXs is free, you can open and use crypto wallets as you wish, using Bitcoin and major altcoins for transactions is still allowed. If you're using a CEX, they need to know who you are. That's a standard procedure that should be in place. Illegal activities involving crypto currencies have increased so much that they've become the first choice for criminal organizations. An average person doesn't need to worry about these issues.

A move like that might cause an exponential increase in purchases of anonymity coins such as Monero (XMR) or Zcash (ZEC) due to banning the trades with them, to allegedly accomplish the extinction of criminality.

And, as consequence of that, the prices will skyrocket. Therefore, having some XMR or ZEC might be an interesting way not only to fight the inflation, but to appreciate value. On the flip side, those coins can be artificially regulated by some institutions that may have acquired, for instance, tons of XMR in order to exert a strict manipulation and generate confusion between the assiduous users.

Government total control is one of the least feared issues today and few people notice how much governments have cut our liberties, which were gained with the struggle of our ancestors. Therefore, we must take profit of every opportunity and try to be two steps forward from total control and governamental persecution.