I opened a couple of threads back in the day when the draft was presented. Basically they want to identify everyone who trades cryptocurrencies in the EU, or with anyone in the EU and all transactions, of any amount.
So it's similar to the one The Netherlands hoped to implement (I remember trezor making it mandatory, receiving backlash, then making it optional.
Normally there is always a time lag between the passage of a law and its implementation. When there is a considerable lapse of time between one and the other, it is because it is difficult to implement.
2 years is long though, the UK expected to implement their crypto based laws within half a year (on registering frequent exchanges and exchangers).
Do not underestimate the EU politburo.
I guess we'll have to wait to see how this will actually work. They probably have the code universities were working on to find evil addresses and may be able to denonymise quite a lot form there and from information provided to exchanges.
How this could be implemented will also have a big effect on how well it works (especially because of their own GDPR rules which should mkae them hesitent on what they retain - such as using aliases or not denonymising people until they want their identity as long as they do enough proof of concepts to ensure they can).
I think we'll get a quick test of how useful these laws are
We'll see a good glimpse into the start of how they plan to implement these laws but they may have implemented some to scare away people from doing certain transactions until more tracking is available to them.
