The answer to that question is a little like people arguing in court "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is." It seems like a simple question, but it's heavily loaded with both future implications and past precedents, and it can be very hard to answer questions like that unless you're prepared to back up your answer. He clearly hadn't done enough research to answer one way or the other.
> He clearly hadn't done enough research to answer one way or the other.
He definitely has, or at least he should have. When ETH switched to PoS things changed, but he hasn't officially updated his opinion on it and wasn't willing to go on record about it at this latest hearing.
You assume he hasn’t done research. Instead it could be his research found there to not be a clear “good” answer and the response was his way out of making a call at such a relatively early industry stage.
> Although, oddly, he's never done a crypto transaction.
As Matt Levine wrote on his newsletter, saying that the SEC must have traded crypto to regulate it is like saying the DEA should have used meth to regulate meth -- if you think the thing is bad, then obviously you should understand it, then ban it, without using it yourself.
Now, people can disagree whether the thing is bad, but it would be foolish to assume that the SEC doesn't know how cryptocurrency works. If you look at the career paths and previous work of most of the top bureaucrats at the SEC, you'll see that they were usually involved in a great deal of legislation or had prominent positions in industry doing real projects.
There is reason to believe that if he did own it directly that would be a conflict of interest. Here is a actual similar story without hyperbole since this actually happened.
'Imagine someone trying to bring a injunction against Liberty Reserve without owning any any stock in the company or having ever used their products'.
I think you may misunderstand the level or type of research that is involved in answering this question. It's mostly not about cryptocurrency: understanding that is the easy part of answering this question. The real research that needed to be done is on the law, and it is much more complicated and convoluted, and can result in unclear answers until someone gets sued and a court is forced to decide one way or the other.
I'm sure that they will write a nice, thorough opinion once they are done with their research. They are not going to be dropping that opinion to answer a surprise question (ie not something they knew was going to be asked) in a congressional hearing.
I am aware of what happened in the testimony. "In private beforehand" doesn't mean "by written request several weeks ahead of time." That would be the requirement to get an answer here.
