Digital Asset News host draws parallels between early skepticism of Tesla's Roadster and current attitudes toward crypto adoption
A solo commentary episode from the Digital Asset News channel, hosted by Rob.
Summary
Rob opens by drawing a parallel between early public skepticism of Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster — specifically a 2018 Joe Rogan interview clip — and current skepticism toward Bitcoin and digital assets replacing traditional banking. He argues that transformative technologies are routinely laughed at before becoming standard, and that crypto is in the same position today. Rob then covers Russia's announced ban on peer-to-peer crypto trades starting July 2027, comparing it to failed bans in China and Nigeria, both of which drove crypto underground and ultimately accelerated adoption. He closes with news that Mastercard is integrating stablecoin payments into its global network via Mastercard Move, covering 17 billion destinations. According to mastercard.com, the supported blockchains include Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base — which Rob argues confirms that winners in the payments space are already being selected.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Tesla Roadster and the Patience Required for Transformative Technology
We live in crazy times. It seems like some of the things that get laughed at just become the most ridiculous ideals and then become the standard. What we're talking about today is a little thing that's been capturing the imagination of the internet far and wide, which is the new Tesla Roadster. Now, this isn't a video about Tesla and what's going on. What we're talking about today is just how long things actually take and where things can potentially go if you're patient enough.
I'm going to play a little clip. This is from 2018. This is Joe Rogan and he's interviewing Elon Musk and they're talking about the Roadster eight years ago. Just take a look at the reaction, which I think mirrors some of the reactions we get when we talk about how Bitcoin and altcoins and digital assets are going to take over the banking sector. Take a listen to this.
Joe Rogan: You need to put rocket thrusters on it.
Elon Musk: For real.
Joe Rogan: Yes.
Elon Musk: What are they going to burn?
Joe Rogan: Nothing. Ultra high pressure compressed air.
Elon Musk: Cold gas thrusters?
Joe Rogan: Then do you have to have air tanks, or are they sucking the air out of—
Elon Musk: Yeah, it's an electric pump. Pump it up to like 10,000 PSI.
Joe Rogan: And how fast are we talking? Zero to sixty — how fast do you want to go?
Rob: So we have that, and it's kind of a funny thing all that time ago. But then if you really take a look at what happened now, everybody's been talking about this. I'm just going to go through it real quick if you haven't seen it — and you're probably one of the 1% who hasn't. These are crazy times and things are moving so fast.
This is the new Roadster that came out yesterday, and just like what he talked about all those years ago, it's happening right now. So if you didn't see it and you're just listening to the video right now, there is this new Tesla Roadster, and with this compressed air it was able to jump over a Tesla truck, a Tesla Semi, another Tesla Model Y, or whatever else was there. And it landed right on its tires just like a cat on its feet.
We take a look at that and we think, well, that's a nice gimmick. But think about it this way. If you're in a head-on collision and you're rolling over and over and your family's in the back, hopefully the airbags deploy, and one of the bigger things is hopefully you don't land on the roof — because if that happens, everybody gets wiped out. So wouldn't that be something if, instead of rolling all over the place, it just stabilized you and your family was able to walk away? That sounds pretty good.
And that was just part of it. Then there was another angle from it that I found fascinating. This is from a real person in the audience, not the nicely put-together graphics Tesla had. And this is how it all worked out — it's just able to go up and stay there. I'm guessing the compressed gas. Then it stabilizes again. I'm blown away. In case you want to take your car up the side of a skyscraper, I suppose. And then the crazy part — it just goes off and drives away like nothing happened.
So these are crazy times. And again, those are the things that people were laughing at Elon Musk about not too long ago on a really popular show. It just goes to show you how long things have to take. I will say this: I know some of these things — we want our bags to pump, we want it to go to Valhalla, we want all this adoption to come in. It takes a little bit of time, and that's just par for the course. But it really comes down to how much adoption are we going to have. Well, some things get adopted and some things don't. Some things you just can't stop — even though Russia is trying.
Russia's Peer-to-Peer Crypto Ban and Why Bans Don't Work
Two conflicting stories today. Russia is to ban direct peer-to-peer crypto trades starting July 2027. Now, as a reminder, every country has tried to ban crypto — China being one of the first — and they failed miserably. We'll go over that in a second. But this is what's going on in Russia.
The restriction will end individuals' ability to exchange crypto assets directly without intermediaries. The Bank of Russia, the country's central bank, explained in guidance updated Monday. The regulator confirmed that such transactions will remain permitted until July 1st, 2027, so there's a little bit of runway — roughly about a year or so. The regulator also clarified that individuals are not allowed to transfer crypto assets from their digital accounts to their own non-custodial or self-custodial wallets.
That's an interesting take, considering that Russia also had Sberbank clearing for crypto trading ahead of a December launch. When we talked about that a couple of days ago, I was like, this is a move in the right direction — a bank that's going to offer different services, whether custodial services, loans, or transfers. And I was like, this is great. And then we got this, and I'm like, that's not so great.
Why is it? Well, there are a lot of different reasons. And it really comes down to: do they think they're going to get away with it? I'm going to show you two different versions of the same story that happened before — one in China and one in Nigeria. As the pattern shows, bans don't kill crypto. They just make it go underground, invisible, and then it grows and grows and they accept it. It's kind of like that old adage: first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. We are in the fighting part, and we are just a bit away — just like Elon and the Roadster.
So, China. The ban itself shut down every crypto exchange in 2017. Remember those days? Everybody was freaking out: "Oh, China is such a huge aspect of the global economy, we'll never recover from that." They banned mining and all crypto trading again in 2021. On paper, it seemed to work great. The yuan's share of Bitcoin trading went from 90% to under 1% in no time whatsoever. China's share of Bitcoin mining went from 34% to 0% in a month when they enforced the ban.
But here's what happened. What it really did was make everything go underground. Seventy-five billion dollars went into underground OTC brokers in just nine months. And as of roughly now, China is the number two mining hub in the world — at 21% of Bitcoin mining operations. I think the majority of Bitcoin mining now goes on in the United States — you can correct me in the comment section, that's what I've seen from the data, but I could be wrong. But number two is China, and they just banned it. So again, things just go underground.
Then we also have Nigeria. Same thing. In 2021 to 2024, banks were told to cut off exchanges. Binance got kicked out, and an executive at a centralized exchange was actually jailed in 2024. On paper, it worked great — exchanges lost their bank accounts, Binance dropped the Naira completely. But what really happened? A 27% jump in peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading after the 2021 ban, and Nigeria became number two in the world for crypto adoption. So again, when you try to force things underground and say you can only do it this way, people go, "No, we're going to do it this way."
So next up, we've got this Russia ban, which happens on July 1st. If you think about it, Russia closed the back door — the centralized exchanges and DeFi — and opened up the front door, which is the bank. Like, look, you can't trade over there, come over here to a regulated place.
I took a look and I couldn't find the exact reason for why they said this, other than a "this is what we do here in Russia" kind of thing. So there are three reasons I can see them trying to do this.
Reason one is control. Every trade is tied to your ID and can of course be frozen. That's a nice little KYC/AML service right there. They can freeze all the different stablecoins, and the coins can't leave Russia.
Reason number two is taxes. We have the same issue here in Puerto Rico. If you start doing everything in cash, it's real hard to track those cash transactions for goods and services, and because of that, not as much tax revenue is generated. Banks can report every trade to the tax office. Peer-to-peer gains were a blind spot. Not anymore.
And number three — this might be a long shot, but I thought it would make a lot of sense — keep out the US dollar. If you take a look at the two big stablecoins in the world, what are they? USDC and Tether. And what are they backed by? The US dollar and treasuries. So if Russia really wants to minimize the circulating supply of the US dollar, especially in stables, they probably want to get rid of that.
So the bet is: will Russians use the front door, or will they go underground like China? I personally think they probably go underground. Let me know what you think about that in the comments section.
But to finish this up — you can't stop it. You can't stop it.
Mastercard Integrates Stablecoin Payments Into Traditional Banking Infrastructure
And this is where we're at. Mastercard is bringing stablecoin balances into traditional banking and card payments. Mastercard is expanding its role in stablecoin payments, and again, like we've said on this channel many a time, the new narrative for this cycle is going to be payments, tokenization of real-world assets. And I've recently added one that made a lot of sense, which is AI agent payments. I think that's going to be the big play. So you've got three to choose from, and Mastercard and Visa are proving us right.
This makes it easier for companies to offer stablecoin payments without building their own infrastructure. This new platform from Mastercard and BBNK Bank connects to Mastercard Move — remember that name — the company's global money transfer network, which can route payments to more than 17 billion destinations including bank accounts and cards. It also connects stablecoin balances to Mastercard's merchant network, so they're actually able to pay somebody for goods and services right alongside everything else.
And I will tell you, if they're able to offer that service for less than, oh, I don't know, Stripe and PayPal and the other payment processors — which charge 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction — and they can say, "How about 0.5%?" Sure, let's do it. You can do that. Guess where everybody moves to.
It also puts Mastercard in closer competition with Visa, which launched a platform in July that lets financial institutions hold, mint, and transfer stablecoins. Two things on that. Visa, Mastercard — you know where I'm going with this. Tether and USDC, which I want to say represent about 90% of all stablecoin trades by volume, are number one and number two. If we take a look at which rails they're on, they're on the best — Binance, Ethereum, and Tron. That's what they're at for twelve months, roughly the same at six months, and the same again at three months and one month. Binance, Ethereum, and Tron consistently.
So the question you have to ask is: what are the rails for Mastercard? Mastercard Move's supported blockchains and networks are Binance, Ethereum plus Arbitrum, Base, and Polygon. I like that. Congratulations — looks like winners are being chosen from the payments department.
And just to verify, this is from mastercard.com: connects across leading blockchain ecosystems, consistent integration including Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base. So if you're looking for the next thing that might be something to add into your repertoire, there you go.
Q&A and Closing Discussion
Rob: Still no love for Tesla. Tesla's great. I mean, I've seen a lot of the accident videos on X and it makes a very compelling case to buy a Tesla. Just saying — expensive. I have a sweet Dodge Grand Caravan minivan, which is paid for, which is very nice. But it does me no good if someone T-bones me and cuts the thing in half. Kind of important to stay around as long as you can.
Early live stream today — it's Friday. The later we do things, the more people are out doing their other stuff, so we try to catch it early. Saturday, same type of thing.
Rob only has love for EOS and Enron — Bobby wouldn't even be interested in those two. He goes hard for degenerate stuff. If you guys don't know my friend Bobby, he's a degenerate gambler and he likes to get into the craziest of things. He was struggling for a while, but he figured out how to sell things and now he's doing just fine. That's the big thing — do you know when to sell? Because we all know how to dollar-cost average and buy. We can buy with the best of them. But it's all about going, well, if it did a 2x, why couldn't it do a 4x? And if it did a 4x, why couldn't it do a 10x? Nobody wants to sell when they get to that point, and they roundtrip everything.
Hyperloop, Boring Company — yeah, all great companies. If you go on X right now, you see all the people who talked negatively about Elon, called him an idiot. And they've got that video we saw as the backdrop. I don't know where that guy finds the energy and the direction to start those companies. I have little tiny companies and I'm exhausted.
Experience is the greatest teacher, because you learn from the mistakes and then the next one you're like, "Okay, I'm not going to do that again. I've got to get out." Nothing wrong with that.
The Roadster from eight years ago was beautiful. I wanted one. Now they Cyber-effed it up. The Cybertruck to me is the ugliest truck of all time. But they say that people with high intelligence, high IQs, find the Cybertruck the most beautiful. So I just doxed myself. My wife thinks the Cybertruck is the most beautiful thing, greatest looking truck of all time. That'll tell you everything you need to know right there.
Ever buy a dog — always adopt. And when you buy a dog, you have to deal with the genetic issues, especially with purebreds — hip dysplasia, different problems with the musculoskeletal system, and autoimmune disorders. So when you're looking for a dog, get a mutt. They're the greatest. They last forever and they love you to death. And they never rugpull you. I've been in many business deals with many dogs. Never rugpulled me. Never went back on the contract.
Joseph Kelly says, "Just merge SpaceX and Tesla. That's all I want." These are the things that have been rumbling out there. I know this is Jerry's thesis — he's been buying Tesla for quite some time, so I'm sure he's happy today.
Does anybody know the stock price today? I don't really check my stock portfolio like ever. Just have Robinhood, DCA, and stuff like that. So, you just had that Roadster expose looking pretty awesome, and the stock today is down 1.3%. Over five days, down almost 6%. Over a month — over six months, down 8%. One year. Five years — barely making it. This is why we diversify, right? It's a funny thing. Tesla's doing great stuff, maybe a little overvaluation, but in the long run I think it'll do really well.
And it's the same thing with Bitcoin. Why is it down? We're just kind of treading water at 80K. Or why is your altcoin down? I'm sure the reason you invested into a specific altcoin is because it has real good fundamentals and adoption characteristics. And you've got to ask yourself, why the hell is it like that? Well, just take a look at Tesla. Same thing.
There used to be a thing in the USA called antitrust. Now there's just a big club with big people and you ain't in it.
The Cybertruck is ugly. Everybody's low IQ like me. And that's it for today.