Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

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What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday. dot i.O, Casper and Exodus, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, March 23rd, and today we are talking about stable coins in the hot seat. Bitcoin is a substitute for gold and a digital dollar prototype

coming by July. There was an absolute flurry of content and commentary

yesterday around the place of Bitcoin, stablecoins, defy, and the digital asset industry as a whole

vis-a-vis U.S. government regulation, as well as how a digital dollar might shake that all up.

Before we get into it, let's set the terms of the debate. One of the competitors

for this cycle's top fud is the government will ban it if it gets sufficiently threatening.

Now, to be clear, banning, depending on your fudster, could mean anything from an outright

ban of use in holding to forceful seizure, to limiting access to on and off ramps, to the more

benign from a commercial standpoint,

but no less threatening from a privacy standpoint, integration of the full crypto infrastructure

into the AML KYC money surveillance apparatus. I've spent some time on this show looking into

global versions where this fud seems to be playing out. In particular, we've been watching

the evolving

situation in India and Nigeria, India, which seems gearing up for a bill that would have some

sort of outright ban, although at least one finance minister says that that's not the case,

and Nigeria, where the central bank of Nigeria first reiterated that banks should not be working

with crypto users, which

they've then subsequently rolled back just a little bit. Either way, however, really, what everyone

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