With the situation with the rapidly declining value of fiat currency it's a no-brainer to see that both governments and criminals will pay a lot to get information that leads to them being able to rob people of bitcoin.

This is one of the primary goals of the Indra project - to make onion routed transaction broadcast - and much of the entire bitcoin p2p network - by default run on a hidden service enabled anonymity routing system.

We might be trying to slip a lightning node and small scale channels into everyone's house as well. It will enable people to sell access to their internet connection via their Indra wifi access point. Also, with the help of something like prisms, make it possible to distribute media via bittorrent, and give a cut to the content owners.

The ability to infringe on the large scale internet routing facilities and place taps in them to gather traffic data volumes of a map of IP addresses, message timing and message volumes. Some former spook boss even said recently that "they make kill orders on metadata".

When the money is in the internet wires you need more than just cryptography to prevent giving usable intelligence to adversaries. Bitcoiners will dive into a primarily anonymised, hidden service connected network. Lightning Network especially needs it, since the protocol requires hot wallets. Anonymised routing should just be a normal network transport layer function, but without being able to be compensated for routing traffic it is not possible for it to be economic and certainly not scalable.

With anonymity as default the risks of running services with keys controlling valuable amounts of UTXOs are dramatically reduced from - well, it's going to be the next decade's equivalent of the $5 wrench attack. I also think that at some point coinjoin and similar things have to become default transaction structuring on chain as well. But we'll get to that yet...