First time I've even heard of this honestly, but my reaction is sort of "meh". Might have been interesting had it gone through, but I don't see how it changes m

First time I've even heard of this honestly, but my reaction is sort of "meh". Might have been interesting had it gone through, but I don't see how it changes much of anything that it didn't either. The courts ruling seems fairly reasonable as well in that bitcoin is a relatively unregulated commodity (in as much as a currency not controlled by any government is unregulated) so I can't really say the ruling was unfair. Given a choice between increased regulation of bitcoin and allowing the exchange to go forward vs. keeping the current relatively lax regulation and no exchange, I'm of the opinion no exchange is the better option. There's also the minor fact that a significant chunk of wallstreet already treats most of the bitcoin markets like commodity exchanges anyway. A significant driver of the massive instability in the bitcoin market is directly attributable to wallstreet treating bitcoin as a commodity. One possible upside of having an actual commodity exchange is that it might have helped stabilize some of that by decoupling the speculation from the actual bitcoin market a little, but I guess we'll never know at this point.