A large part of the push for crowdfunding has come from entrepreneurs and their advocates who believe that a larger pool of funds will be beneficial to the entire country. However, investors expect that the regulators are watching out for them when they invest, by making sure that they are not being maliciously misled by stock salesmen.

The SEC is struggling to write rules that keep that investment expectation intact while still fulfilling the requirements of the JOBS Act. It is nowhere near an easy task. If this had been pitched with the nasty truth - that opening the crowdfunding door meant that a lot of investors would lose their entire investment when the company went bankrupt - then we might have had some faster turnaround. But instead, Congress requested that the SEC write rules that would offer investors the same level of assurance for startups that it requires for large publicly-traded firms. That doesn't get done in a Congressional pie-in-the-sky deadline.