How a $20 bitcoin buy led to a multiyear hassle

That's the sound of bitcoin investors bopping their foreheads on their keyboards through early 2018 as the price of the cryptocurrency plummets (currently down to a value of around $10,191 from a high near $20,000 last year). I'm a bitcoin investor of sorts, but my forehead is unmarked by QWERTY keys.

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In 2014, bitcoin was still the new and rising kid on the block -- a mystery, a temptation, a promise. The idea of a bitcoin ATM where you could exchange cash for pieces of cryptocurrency felt like a fresh and daring idea dancing at the edges of financial regulations. And I was one of the first US users of this newfangled kind of machine.

Enchanted Bitcoins, a company that hasn't updated its website since 2014, installed one of the nation's first bitcoin ATMs just a few blocks from my house in Albuquerque, New Mexico. On a bright February afternoon, I strolled into the Imbibe bar in the swanky-funky Nob Hill neighborhood and found Enchanted Bitcoins founder Eric Stromberg manning the ATM amid a haze of cigar smoke

Drumroll please ...

On Jan. 15, my $20 bill from 2014 was worth nearly $400. Nice. I could buy a used guitar, I thought to myself. The next day, it had fallen into the 200s. Suddenly, I was mentally shopping for used guitar pedals instead. On Jan. 18, it was back up over $300.

Now, in mid-February, it's barely over $280. I eye the jagged chart showing bitcoin's price fluctuations over the last couple of months. It looks like a heartbeat monitor going haywire. But there is a distinctive downward pattern.

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The indictment lists two other organizations, Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering, both based in Russia. The organizations were shell companies that Yevgeniy Viktorovich Progzhin used to fund the IRA, according to the indictment.

By "early to mid-2016," the IRA's efforts started supporting then-candidate Trump's campaign and attacking candidate Hillary Clinton's political efforts. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said there's no evidence in the indictment that the effort had "any effect on the outcome of the election."

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