what are the implications of this?
Quoting from the article
Yes, I am very curious about what he has planned. My guess is that he is just going to shut them all down at once and see what happens.
This might be actually something we should worry about. Personally, I am not running a Lightning Network node but to ensure that payments made from my LN wallet won't fail, I opened a channel to one of the biggest nodes. Shutting down such node might cause to break the connection between many users which would result in failing payments.
I have just checked that node using
https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ and the total capacity of that node is 36.08798090 BTC (49.054 % of total) $225,146.42. Source:
https://1ml.com/node/036b32ac6acf6d178f47c2139b7327ab85bd3d5f5c40681a9a48109ea21f53e1e5