Google Searches for Bitcoin Are Skyrocketing to ‘Unprecedented’ Levels in Several Countries

Bitcoin continues to trade around $31,000, remaining range-bound ever since hitting its all-time highs of $42,000. This ATH came at the same time that we saw record outflows from gold products.

As Bitcoin continues to see record inflows, “We’re talking about Bitcoin over the next three, five, 10 years slowly inching away at gold’s market capitalization,” said Vijay Ayyar, head of Asia Pacific with crypto exchange Luno in Singapore.

Compared to Bitcoin’s $595 billion market cap, gold has a much larger market at $10 trillion. In addition to being a gold 2.0 narrative, over the last year, people drew into bitcoin for its “verifiable scarcity” as more fiscal stimulus was injected into the financial system.

The new money in the market is increasingly “buying Bitcoin as a hedge to inflation and as digital gold,” said Matt Long, head of distribution and prime brokerage at digital-asset platform OSL in Hong Kong.

All of this interest has Google searches for Bitcoin in the US around late December 2017 levels. In the US, investors are looking ahead to the Federal Reserve’s FOMC meeting, where the Fed is expected to reinforce its dovishness.

While the US has yet to see record searches, the trend in other countries, especially those abused by the government’s printing press, such as Argentina, sees unprecedented levels of interest.

Google searches of "Bitcoin" already at all-time highs in: pic.twitter.com/RPTQxihyd1

— Documenting Bitcoin 📄 (@DocumentBitcoin) January 25, 2021

Argentina’s economy is reeling from high inflation, price depreciation, debt, and economic contraction, causing unemployment and leading to the adoption of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin proponent Michale Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, tweeted last month,

“Whenever someone questions our Bitcoin Strategy, I always wonder what advice the critic would give to the 44 million people in Argentina.”

Just a couple of weeks back, Marcos Galperin, Argentine billionaire and CEO of the e-commerce platform Mercado Libre said that “BTC as a store of value is better than gold.”

But Argentina is not the only country showing so much interest in the censorship-resistant cryptocurrency; bitcoin searches on Google have reached new highs in Chile, Colombia, and Nigeria as well.

Along with Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Austria, and Switzerland show particularly heightened interest worldwide.