One investor who wasn’t deterred was Barstool Sports Inc. founder Dave Portnoy. In May, he announced to his 2.6 million followers on Twitter that he’d bought US$40,000 worth, despite saying that SafeMoon could be a Ponzi scheme, a scam in which early investors’ returns are paid with funds coming from later buyers that collapses when new deposits dry up or too many people try to cash out.
However, while there are some organisations that accept it as currency, others shy away due to Bitcoin’s dramatic price swings. Driven largely by speculation, the price per Bitcoin rose sharply from $1,151 in January 2017, to an all-time high of $19,783 in December the same year.* It then dropped to below $7,000 by February 2018 and rallied again to around $11,000 over a matter of days, before plunging once more to trade below $4,000. Subsequently, one of the key characteristics of Bitcoin that traders should understand is its potential for extreme volatility.

Brooks quit his role at San Francisco-based Binance.US, citing "differences over strategic direction" in the Twitter post. He worked only three months at the company, which is the American counterpart to Binance — the Chinese company that operates the largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume.
“Some people just didn’t like it, and I understand that,” Karony said in the interview. “The points that I wanted to come across, we just weren’t able to actually tell people in a structured manner.”