Hester Peirce is perplexed. For years, the Securities and Exchange Commission, of which Peirce is a member, has denied applications by the nation’s exchanges and financial firms to list securities that track the performance of popular digital currency bitcoin. Earlier — say, 10 years ago — concerns about potential market manipulation and liquidity may have made sense, but things have changed. “That is the probably the biggest, the most-often-asked question that I get: When will the SEC approve a bitcoin exchange-traded product?” Commissioner Peirce said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. “I thought that if we had ... (full story)