just to save ur asses from gettin rekt .. the reason primecoin is pumping is because rhett creighton (zclassic/bitcoin private) announced he was going to do another pump n dump -- Bitcoin Prime which will be forked off primecoin ,.. so watch his twitter plus the new bitcoin prime new twitter page.. as soon as it forks dump primecoin, because everybodys gonna dump after it forks for Bitcoin prime.. he did with bitcoin private.. went to 50$ and dumped .. so hes off the team now, and now decided to do another coin.
I agree that the 4 fold jumping in price was surely due to BTC Prime announcement but there is something not making perfect sense.
I have been mining Primecoin (intermittently depending on profit) since mad had created the miner and merged with eXtremal's because it was the only coin that is still profitable with those older cards even till early 2018. But Primecoin's mining difficulty got pass 11 in Mar and old cards will not get any profit at all, so these must be new miners. Even if someone wants to get XPM for price speculation, there is no need (and too inefficient) to join the mining as one can just simply buy from the exchange.
So attention to XPM was already started in Mar well before Rhett's announcement. Of course it can be simply two quite independent events. Miners switched to XPM in Mar might simply due to be being more profitable than ETH but not really that much profitable before the pump in price and I doubt XPM was having much attention to them anyway.
Anyway price vs mining difficulty is always a function of each other. If the price drops later, the difficulty will follow.
