Nicolas Morgan

The Ten-Year Hibernation: How the SEC completely ignored its own internal rule to decide SRO appeals within 10 months, stretching it to a full decade. • Weaponized Delay: The severe financial, competitive, and reputational toll exacted on a firm when forced into prolonged regulatory stagnation. • The SRO Double Standard: How self-regulatory organizations like the NYSE and FINRA alternate between claiming they are private entities to evade the Constitution, while functioning as the government

Dr. W. Scott Stornetta, whose early 1990s research on digital timestamping and immutable records laid the foundation for blockchain and was cited throughout Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper, joined ICAN’s Capital Ideas podcast to discuss distributed trust, the evolution of digital currency, the existential challenge AI poses to reality, and why prosperity does not depend on coupling everything to the U.S. dollar.

And just yesterday, the SEC finally rescinded the Gag Rule. After becoming the norm in the early seventies, the Gag Rule forced anyone who settled with the agency to agree, for the rest of their life, never to publicly deny the SEC's allegations against them. With 98% of SEC defendants settling, the rule muted criticism of the agency's enforcement actions for the past 50 years and exempted the SEC from the very standard it holds everyone else to—transparency.