[TomSwirly]

> They have acted slowly but surely, without impulsivity, taking the time to understand the technology

This must be a joke... right?

They've had fourteen years to understand the technology. But more, if they didn't understand this, it was their responsibility to not allow it to happen until they did.

The SEC has an active responsibility to proactively prevent fraud and financial panics. By allowing unregistered, unregulated, unaudited securities to proliferate for 14 years while they apparently did or said nothing, they have allowed this to become a trillion dollar problem. If a conventional investment bank had done anything like this, the SEC would not have allowed this, but they dropped the ball utterly and completely here.

[Georgelemental]

> But more, if they didn't understand this, it was their responsibility to not allow it to happen until they did.

"Everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden" seems like a uniquely terrible legal precedent to set.

[danaris]

There's a difference between applying this in the general case, and applying it in finance, where letting something go unregulated just because it's new is nearly guaranteed to result in rampant scams and people losing their life savings to the unscrupulous who misrepresented their offerings.