Baidu search trends in 2019 show Chinese bitcoin interest being driven largely by price action news. Meanwhile, ‘BTC’ has become a more popular search term than ‘bitcoin’ according to data from Google Trends.
Chinese Bitcoin Interest is News Driven
Tweeting on Friday trader and analyst Alex Krüger revealed spikes in Chinese bitcoin interest as shown by Baidu searches coincided with significant price action and news events.
Chinese interest in bitcoin has been on the rise in 2019
(as measured by Baidu searches) pic.twitter.com/qWQDXjAWZT
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) September 20, 2019
The chart below from Krüger shows massive spikes during the April Fool’s breakout, late June price rally to $13,800, and the VanEck ‘pseudo-ETF’ news to name a few.
On average, Chinese interest in bitcoin for 2019 has been on the rise. Back in June, Bitcoinist reported that there was a growing BTC interest in China amid tighter capital controls and the trade war with the United States.
On the global level, data from Google Trends shows a continued decrease in bitcoin interest since hitting its 2019 peak in the last week of June 2019.
Coincidentally, this period was also when the top-ranked cryptocurrency pulled off its rise to the current 2019 all-time high (ATH).
Compared side-by-side, Baidu and Google search trends for bitcoin paint a somewhat similar picture. The Google Trends chart also shows significant peaks in early April, mid-May, and late-June — periods that coincide with massive price rallies.
In the last few weeks, bitcoin’s price action has remained flat with successive retracements below $10,000 followed by an immediate climb towards the $10,300 resistance level.
BTC 7 Times More Popular than Bitcoin
In a related development, BTC is now a more popular search term than bitcoin on Google. Comparing both on Google Trends shows that sometime after early August, there was a huge spike in interest in BTC over bitcoin.
Despite a significant decline since the start of September, BTC popularity as a search term on Google Trends still outpaces bitcoin by more than 86%.
Why does this matter? — well, being the general trading name for bitcoin, it is possible that some traders are trying to manipulate the market by propping up interest in BTC.
Trading bots set up to enter into positions and execute trades based on algorithms data mining patterns between BTC searches and price trends could be gamed into thinking there is a spike in bitcoin interest.
Trijo News, a Swedish crypto media outlet first reported on the inorganic trend revealing that it began in Romania.
Do you think some traders are trying to game the system using inorganic BTC searches? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Bitcoinist Image Library