After the drop in prices last March 12th, people showed greater interest in Bitcoin than in gold. In recent days, the words “buy Bitcoin” have been especially popular in countries like Spain and Brazil.
In the last few days, Google search trends have indicated that more Internet users are interested in buying Bitcoin than in buying gold. The result shows that, despite the turbulence that the cryptocurrency market has recently experienced, there is a global interest in acquiring the first cryptocurrency.
Traditionally, the words “buy gold” are more popular among investors, but that changed last March 12th. Despite the cryptocurrency market drop that day, Google registered a higher search demand for the terms “buy Bitcoin”. In this type of case, the search engine uses a scale of interest over time ranging from 0 to 100. According to this measure, a value of 0 reflects the lack of enough data while 100 indicates the maximum popularity of a given term.
On that occasion, the words “buy Bitcoin” reached the highest value of 100 units worldwide, while “buy gold” recorded 63. A day later, the trend reversed and “buy gold” rose to a value of 53 while “buy Bitcoin” fell to 40, a search trend that has remained with similar values to the date. According to Google, the average in recent days has favored the searches for gold with a ratio of 44 compared to 28 for Bitcoin.
The ten countries that showed the greatest interest in Bitcoin were Cameroon, Nigeria, Romania, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, and Vietnam. Regarding the Spanish-speaking countries, the most prominent were the searches in Spain (13), Brazil (19) and Mexico (31).
Some analysts refer to last March 12th as “Black Thursday”, since there was a collapse in the prices of the cryptocurrency market. Multiple factors, mainly due to the fear of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fall of the stock markets and the oil price war, led to this critical situation. That day, the price of Bitcoin was USD 7,635 at 1:00 a.m., but then it fell to USD 4,260 at 10 p.m., according to data from LiveCoinWatch.
It is not the first time that the words “buy Bitcoin” have been more popular than the terms “buy gold” in Google searches. An analysis of the records since 2004 allows seeing the prominence of Bitcoin in the market. For example, between May 2017 and February 2018, the search for information about buying Bitcoin exceeded that of buying gold on several occasions. The first cryptocurrency in the market reached its peak in December 2017, when it climbed to USD 20,000 per unit.
The word Bitcoin is also very popular in the Google searches that Latin American Internet users conduct. For example, Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil, and Colombia are the most active countries regarding queries about the first cryptocurrency on the Internet. Furthermore, the proximity of the next Bitcoin halving, estimated for the third week of May 2020, have also drawn people’s attention to these words on a global scale.
By Alexander Salazar
