You can self-host your wallet. No one is forbidding that. You just need to share KYC information to exchanges when you withdraw to self-hosted wallet. This seems very reasonable to me.

To sign up with any US exchange today don’t you already need to share KYC information anyway?

But you don't have to share it with cryptokitties yet...

Decentralized finance is all about automated counterparties, smart contracts that run code to match buyers and sellers, execute transactions and move funds. There's nobody there to verify KYC information.

And then what? Everyone has to keep KYC records of the counterparties that they transacted with? What if there's a country where such regulations don't apply? There goes your KYC chain.

What I am saying is this is restriction to exchanges. If you never deal with exchanges no KYC restriction is applied to you.

Ah I see. I was tripped up by

> So, if you currently use a cold storage wallet like a Ledger Nano S or a software wallet such as MetaMask, you may soon find yourself running afoul of new regulations.

But apart from that, the rest of the article seems to agree with you.

I thought the entire point of cryptocurrencies is is to keep going up and "mooning"