"Buy Bitcoin" is Trend topic for Google searches

The online search phrase “buy bitcoin” is now more popular than “buy gold,” according to the latest data from Google Trends. The tide began to change in favor of bitcoin only in the spring of this year, with “buy gold” search phrase completely dominating the field prior to that. On average, gold still wins out in 2017, but this might not be for long, as shown on the Google Trends chart.

Elsewhere, the rise of bitcoin is attracting new investors to the crypto market. As gold experiences a decline in trading, bitcoin is seeing a rise in the number of Google searches. According to BullionVault, Internet searches for ‘buy bitcoin’ are now overtaking ‘buy gold’ just as the digital currency overtook ‘buy silver’ in the New Year.

While the price of Bitcoin is extremely volatile, more and more investors are turning from traditional assets towards cryptocurrency. Despite its volatility, Bitcoin has risen more than 700% in value in just the past year, while gold has risen 11% over the same timeline – not a bad return in the world of traditional investing, but not comparable to Bitcoin. According to Bloomberg, Bitcoin’s growth was thirteen times the growth of the “best-performing commodity” that it was tracking.

Bitcoin’s future is very uncertain, but if the token value of Bitcoin manages to reach approximately US$33,700, the market cap for when all 21 million Bitcoins have been mined will match that of gold. Some analysts expect Bitcoin to reach US$10,000 before the end of the year.

All that being said, gold has “demonstrated reliability”, in the words of APMEX. The precious metal has been held and traded as a commodity for centuries, and that will not change overnight, no matter how quickly Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general continue to skyrocket.