BERLIN, El Salvador (AP) — At a geothermal power plant near El Salvador’s Tecapa volcano, 300 computers whir inside a trailer as they make complex mathematical calculations day and night verifying transactions for the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators have accused a group of people of promoting a securities offering tied to digital currency that raised over $2 billion from retail investors without being properly registered.

Identifying the determinants of asset prices is one of the most important questions in finance. Traditional asset pricing theories are founded on the idea that equity prices should be determined by fundamentals such as earnings (Gordon 1959, Campbell and Shiller 1988). In contrast, the behavioral finance literature posits that prices do not always follow fundamentals due to investor sentiment trading (Shiller 1981, Baker and Wurgler 2006, Stambaugh et al. 2012). Eventually however, equity prices seem to trace their fundamentals (Pa´stor and Veronesi, 2003, 2006, Bartram and Grinblatt 2018).
The CFPB names more specific risks that consumers should be prepared for, including volatile exchange rates, potential high fees on exchange platforms, and fraud risk. If your funds are lost or stolen, they can be especially difficult to recover, thanks to the decentralized nature of blockchain and lack of any governmental oversight.