...and if someone bites the bullet and starts a licensed exchange, the fun's only starting -- where to find registered securities to trade???
It's not currently possible to start a licensed exchange. There aren't any laws to make it possible.
http://www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg.shtml
Those laws don't apply to cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin.
Sauce?
And which "those laws" are them those?
P.S: US law is THE OPPOSITE of access control on Apache servers. It works like this:
Allow all
Deny Bad.thing.1, Bad.thing.2, ...
Horrible way to secure a server, 'coz everything not explicitly forbidden is ALLOWED.
No law? Then shit's allowed. See?