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Comment by est | Hacker News Reader

The China factor behind this "surge" is because this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company) started doing business in China. It's growing very huge.

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There are thousands of videos popping up on YouTube with how much money these people have 'made' on MMM Global, it's sad to see;

https://www.youtube.com/results?lclk=week&search_query=mmm+g...

It's very likely a big part of the price increase, many of the local MMM sites advertise that they're bitcoin-only and all of the exchanges are extraordinarily shallow so small surges in demand really move prices.

Here's a pretty good article from a mid October predicting the huge run-up based on interest in MMM and how they reward posts to social media where people show off how much they've "made":

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/mmm-global-republic-of...

If anyone pays for better website analytics, I bet you'd find a pretty striking increase in the MMMGlobal rankings in the past month or so that corresponds pretty strongly with bitcoin price. One more note is that the exact same price runup happened in July with Litecoin based on a different Chinese ponzi scheme:

http://www.dailytradingprofits.com/4669/was-litecoin-pumped-...

Thank you for those links.

It's crazy that people are falling for this even though they reuse the MMM brand and feature Sergei Mavrodi prominently. A simple google search should tell you what you need to know about the company and the people running it. It's sad really.

I thought google wasn't doing business in China. Could be a local search engine is getting kickbacks, or a cut of a the ad revenue.

These these videos feel like they're following a script. Even the titles of all the videos are the same. "MMM Global Pays <amount>!"

They probably are scripted, MMM was famous among Russians for creating ads featuring 'commoner' actors in the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonya_Golubkov

Side note: I don't know if anyone with the skill has the extra time on their hands, but it'd be interesting to track BTC through the MMM accounts to try and locate their largest addresses. It has to be in the millions by now if not much more..

It is easy to hide those amounts by just using a lot of different addresses. Of course people can try to tie those addresses together again, but that's pretty hard.

Yes, the MMM Global ponzi scheme now requires participants to fund their account in bitcoins. This is likely what nudged the price of Bitcoin upward. Even the CEO of BTCC (China's 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange) admits it: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-price-breaks-260-to-hit-two-...

However, at this point the Bitcoin price surge alone almost certainly ignited a Bitcoin speculative bubble that is self-sustaining and would continue even if MMM was shut down today. I mean look at a hockey stick graph like this, it's enough to trick people into thinking now is a good time to buy "because it's going up": http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg30zig6-hourztg...

This speculative bubble is taking place mostly in China right now, as all Chinese exchanges trade at a premium over American exchanges. In fact Huobi just hit 3188 CNY (503 USD): https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/huobi/btccny when most American exchange are at 460 USD —a 9% arbitrage opportunity!

It's only kind of an arbitrage. There's also a huge onshore / offshore spread for Renminbi, but you can only move currency onshore for very specific purposes.

I'm a bit confused, the Wikipedia link says it was shut down in 1997 and makes no mention of bitcoin. Is it the same company or is MMM now being used as a generic term?

As Tomku pointed out, it's the same company with the same scammer running it. I know back in 2011 they relaunched as MMM-2011 (creative, I know) and then in 2012, you guess it, MMM-2012. I know some people that were involved in it back then and one of them lost something like $5k. You can get people to do very stupid things if you convince them that you can help them get rich quick.

It's the exact same company run by the exact same guy using the exact same branding. Search for "MMM Pays" on Youtube and you'll get thousands of videos people uploaded talking about how rich they got off the current scam.

http://m.china-mmm.net/cn/news/rules_and_recommendations_on_...

A film (PiraMMMida) came out in 2011 depicting the rise and fall of MMM in early-90s Russia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-JgGV8cH1I

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606652/

I did not expect this to be published on the official MMM Worldwide channel

It's officially run as a pyramid scheme in all marketing for the last two iterations at least.

Wait, MMM Global is the same company that perpetrated one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history?

It's not just china. MMM is popping up all over the place lately.

Wow, so this is THE "MMM" that people are talking about. They took Russians for a ride in the 90s, I didn't think I'd hear this name again.

Agree this is unnatural. Mmm is one theory, gold commodity price isn't doing too well very little reason for Bitcoin to bull at this time

Still an impressive gain looking at 30 days trend https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin/usd

Somehow I refuse to believe that this surge in price is natural.

Price fluctuation in tradeable products of any kind is never "natural", it is supply/demand-driven. And supply and demand are complex forces with much turbulence from a vast number of influences.

Speculation is a thing. BC is still infinitesimal in terms of the global economy and even relatively tiny movements of money can underline or pop a bubble.

Yes, and speculation is one of the forces affecting demand.

There is no such thing as a "natural" price move in any tradeable product. The term has no meaning; all trading is based on some form of speculation or other forces.

People use "natural" or "baseline" to refer to the price a commodity returns to after a bubble burst. Though, price movements are more chaotic than that and you can have short term spikes, swings from external effects ex: natural disasters, short term 'bubbles', and demand from things like tax policy changes so "natural" is somewhat vague.

So, the implication is it's what happens when you remove short term and artificial effects.

In practice I've never heard anyone use the word "natural" in regards to price movement in a tradeable product, not in the five years I've been working in the financial industry. Sounds like more of a layman's term, perhaps. But the line between short-term and long-term movements is nearly non-existent since one typically affects the other, and the idea that there is any sense of normal price movement that lies behind all that turbulence is fairly naive.

It is a defined term, but I think trymas is referring to the layman's usage.

"natural price" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/natural_price

A price for a good or service that is equal to the cost of production.

Oh well that is a totally different term than the context it is being used in here.

This is false, a lot of things are seasonal or weather related.

The weather does not cause prices to change. Traders do. The weather can be an influence on supply or demand economics, but price fluctuation at its core is not a natural phenomenon by any means.

Very unlikely the cause considering the amount of hits their website is getting.

Believe what you want but MMM isn't even getting 1/10 the hits of a single bitcoin exchange.

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