In the US, they regulate penny stocks, and those things are only worth a few pennies. The issue isn't the value of the commodity--it's the potential for avoidable loss due to market manipulation.
Hi, I respectfully disagree with your comment that the issue here is the potential for avoidable loss.
Loss of value is the counterfactual to value, or to put it another way, you cannot worry about avoiding losses until you have something to lose.
The regulator has therefore sent a signal to the market that Bitcoins have value by the virtue of the very regulation it will use to protect consumers from the loss of Bitcoins.
My point is that not all market signals carry equal weight and a market signal given by a regulator is significant.
You understand that the value of something is not tied to the value of its base unit, right?
If you want to be pedantic, the value of a base unit of Bitcoin is about $.000006.