Sorry, I am talking about 2015 exclusively there; "November" is Nov/2015 not Nov/2013.

My proposal is that the rise from $220 to the almost-stable $330 level in the last 3 months was due to the MMM ponzi and copycats in China. It was definitely pulled by OKCoin and Huobi, who saw a huge increase in daily trade volume (10x their records before Sep/2015, including the levels during the Nov/2013 rally). Whereas Bitstamp and Bitfinex saw a much more modest increase in volume, that barely reached the levels seen in several previous occasions (such as Jul/2015 and Feb/2015).

As for the mini-rally of the last 3 days, from $320 to $360, I don't think that it can be explained by Bitcoin Black Friday sales (unless it was the PrimeDice offer above).  BBF 2014 had no influence on the price, and this one seems to have been a flop.

If bitcoiners are expecting the price to go up further, they should buy and hold rather than buy to spend, even with "20% off" offers.  Only early adopters who bought well below the current $350 price may think that it is a good time to take profits.  So BBF may actually have a negative effect on the price...

If Black Friday was responsible for the "sub-rally" of the last 2-3 days, perhaps it is because of this offer from PrimeDice? 


How could this be for real?  Could they be planning an exit scam?

In your mind, perhaps.  I have not seen a better explanation, or a reason to exclude it as the cause.  IIRC, the CEOs of both OKCoin and BTC-China thought so too.


AFAIK the ponzi is still going on.  The rally to $500 in early November was magnified by speculation (traders all over the world buying more BTC because they saw the price rising), but probably half of the rise (from $220 to ~$330) could well be due to the ˜fresh" demand created by the MMM ponzi and its copycats in China. It definitely attracted many Chinese citizens who had no interest in bitcoin until then.

The pattern of volume at Bitfinex over the last year is similar to that of Bitstamp.  Namely, the volume during the "sub-rally" of the last 2-3 days is above average, but still much less than the peak of early Novermber, and comparable to the volume seen several times during 2015.. 



My theory is that new demand in mainland China created the Oct-Nov/2013 rally, and perhaps also the Mar-Apr/2013 one. The prices in China were clearly higher than the "Western" prices during the rally, and lower during Dec/2013 crash.  In my theory, Willy's operator was doing arbitrage: buying coins from Gox clients with non-existent dollars, and selling them for real yuan at some Chinese exchange(s).  I think that it is possible that the yuan (worth perhaps 0.5 G USD) were confiscated by China's central bank after the Dec/2013 decree that closed the bank accounts of all Chinese exchanges.

PS. About MMM's  Bitcoin Ponzi, a perturbing factor is what MMM will do with the bitcoins that it collects. 

(Ostensibly, the victims send bitcoins directly to each other, and MMM does not touch the bitcoins and does not take commission.  However, it is a safe bet that many of the people asking for donations are actually MMM bosses.)

I doubt that he will want to keep bitcoins for long.  So, after the ponzi collapses, the price may eventually return to the $220 level.

No idea; but there are many Chinese with money, and they seem to be at least as susceptibe to ponzis as any other people in the world.  Serge's previous ponzis in Russia moved billions of dollars, and a repeat seems quite possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company)


IF the Chinese government decides to stop MMM and any other bitcoin ponzi(s), it could easily close the exchanges and criminalize the trade of bitcoin, including Localbitcoins type markets.  It will not stop "black market" trade, but most would-be ponzi victims are unlikely to resort to it.

However, governments generally avoid stopping a ponzi while it is in full rally phase.  If a government did that, millions of victims would blame it, rather than the ponzi operators, for their losses.  (Apparently, that is the discourse that Sergei used to get elected to the Duma by his victims.  And may have been also the argument that James Ray "Silver King" Houston, father of BFL's Sonny Vleisides, used to convince the jurors who absolved him.)  If a government fails to stop a ponzi right at the start, it usually waits for the ponzi to collapse on its own.


It may have an effect, but (AFAIK) it is mostly a US and Canada tradition, not significant in China; and the volume at Bitstamp is actually lower today than in their best days of 2015.

There was no significant price move on Black Friday 2014, so its impact on bitcoin buying then was not significant.  Several signs point to a general decline of bitcoin use for e-shopping over the last 12-18 months.  So I would expect even less spending (hence less impact on price) on this Black Friday than on the previous one.

This rally cannot be due to Black Friday.  The big surge in volume is in the Chinese exchanges, especially Huobi and OKCoin.  Since September, these two have seen an unprecedented surge in volume. Just in the last 3 days, Huobi's volume was 3.5 M BTC, about 10x the maximum volume seen anytime before September, but comparable to typical 3-day values since September.

My guess for the cause of the rally is still Mainland Chinese non-bitcoiners buying bitcoin to use in the MMM ponzi.

Thanks for the correction.  (I confess that I skipped most of his talk and went straight to the questions part.)

Given his new position with Epiphyte, and Epiphyte's stated goal, I suppose that negotiations with the "other country" also failed.

Edan Yago (CEO of Epiphyte) at the 2013 Bitcoin conference

He reveals that the host country of the project was supposed to be Honduras, in his reply to one of the first questions.

Another interview from 2014, no relevant info.

Visa Europe Collab seems to be a project that gives out some VC money to many startups ("innovation partners").

However, I don't see Epiphyte among the "partners"  listed in the Visa Europe Collab page.  Are they nestled under some of those partners, such as Accelerator Academy or Digital Catapult?

(And Epiphyte has one of those "mobile-oriented" websited with three words per page.  Like those books for toddlers.  Cringe.)

Speaking of Satoshi, do you guys think that he may be one of the Elders of the Internet?

[ Here is the continuation of that sketch. ]

The CEO of Bitcoin is a VERY discrete person.  So discrete that its very existence is known only to a handful of people in a certain powerful agency, whose existence too is a well-guarded secret.

But we can infer that he exists.  Otherwise, who would have signed Satoshi Nakamoto's contract?

My take on what happened:

A couple of days ago, hackers from Anonymous claimed to have located an address belonging to IS with 3 M USD worth of bitcoins in it.  

The German Kopp reporter read that announcement, and either misread that word as locked (sperrte?), or just assumed that the authorities had promptly called the CEO of Bitcoin and told him to freeze that account.

The NewsBTC owner/writer saw that German report and changed the locked to seized (which is the usual term for that thing in bank contexts).

Interbank payment delays of several hours to days are a major inconvenience to customers and a drag on the economy.  But, what crimes do they allow? 

Today I Learned:

Actual Bull and Bear fights in Spanish California

Yes, I am sure that pretty good solutions that problem were known and used for many years before bitcoin.  Those solutions may not be universally used for many reasons -- including inertia and risk avoidance.  

Or safety.  Delays of hours or days in interbank transfers are an important safety feature, and maybe exist for that reason alone.   When instantaneous transfers are possible, bank hackers and money launderers often take advantage of them, by passing the stolen money through several banks in quick succession, to delay the investigators.  Kidnapping and armed robberies also becomes easier and safer, since the ransom can be paid from the victim's bank account and cashed out before the police becomes aware of the crime.

They don't need tokens.  The bitcoin network needs tokens in order to pay the miners, who are anonymous and scattered all over the world.  In a "permissioned ledger" (i.e., a distributed mirrored decentralized tamper-resistant database for a closed set of non-anonymous, legally bound entities), transaction processing would be done by the member entities, for whom the service would be compensation enough; and/or by external contractors, who would get paid in dollars through banks, the old-fashioned way.

Thus a "permissioned ledger" does not need tokens or proof-of-work.  It remaisn to be seen whether it will have a use for any of the other distinctive features of the Bitcoin protocol.

Localbitcoins booming in Russia:
http://coin.dance/charts/RUB

Former Russian victims of previous MMM ponzis, who still believe and are joining the new edition?

Russian drug users and other DNM customers building their reserves before the anti-BTC law goes into effect?

Whatever the reason: how much would that growth have contributed to the last rally?

Well, it wasn't. 

It happened on 2012-11-28, and the price didn't budge for 5 weeks. 

Then a  rally started, that peaked on Apr/2013... pulled by BTC-China, which
had just ben taken over by Bobby Lee, and explained as the "discovery" of bitcoin
by the Chinese amateur commodity speculators.

Correlation does not imply causation.  Lack of correlation is strong evidence of lack of causation...