This CFTC meeting is bullish as fuck!
The commissioner's closing remarks were indeed quite positive. He prefaced the following by noting that he considered the Professor's (panelist Houman Shadab) remarks about tying assets to the blockchain quite fascinating. He continued:
...
And it just seems like based on what I have learned, some of those applications could be so compelling that it would be a real mistake for us as a commission to not make sure we are staying on top of these development's. Not, because we want to do anything other than understand the developments because it seems like this protocol, the Bitcoin protocol or something like it is very, very likely here to stay.
So the more information and education we can do on this now in trying to stay somewhere on the appropriate spot of the learning curve, it seems to be a very sensible thing to do.
So I think that it has been very, very helpful
Edit: And as usual, Jerry Brito nailed it. He dealt with a lot of the really annoying and difficult questions like how to explain the implications of "open source", or "mining", or "is it a currency or commodity" to regulators. I don't envy the job of trying to distill a topic which takes *months* for smart people to understanding into a 30 second summary, on the spot.