Topic: google trends says there is no fuss at all - page 2. (Read 5693 times)

As notme, Hexadecibel and others have already pointed out, you don't need a spike in google trends index to indicate influx of new users: a constant search volume means there are new users introduced all the time. We don't need exponential growth - that's the specialty of inflationary currencies.

only stats that we have publicly available are in the link i posted earlier

Are there statistics on the number of new posts in there somewhere?

ElectricMucus, there is plenty of media mention https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=77.0

Yes but we just learned something new. Bitcoin is growing from other sources than google or media mentioning it.
Next goal would be to find out what those sources are.

That is something you will never read out of a price-chart ...

Furthermore people join the forum and they leave it. We can't tell how many people left but we can look at pageviews and most online and get a better idea.



ITT we are looking for reasons that is something a chart can not give because it only contains market information. Explaining why those market movement happened is what we are trying to accomplish here.

Not to mention the lag of such sources vs near realtime pricing information.

Chart analysis is not mentioned here above.
But this has been one of the best ways to predict bitcoin price movement.
Even if some people don't believ in it, I have to say that it is a great tool: it encompasses already all the fundamental questions and brings it down to a simple thing. And it avoids getting trapped in a forest and mud of thousands of info sources.

Looks like the population isn't staying the same at all.

relative stats
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats > forum history part
for the past year this forum gets about 2000 new users joining constantly each month

I google bitcoin quite often, several times a week to find out what people say about it other than on this forum. I haven't said that people googleing bitcoin is a necessity for growth, but the other way around, people googling BTC certainly leads to growth. Growth can come from somewhere else than google, as I said before.

Again I think btc is having concentrated growth, that is the same as economic growth where the population stays the same and the gdp is rising.

[reposting this because it is very relevant]

tl;dr -- it takes about a month or two to bootstrap to the point where you can and are willing to make a real investment


I also think that a lot of you old timers mis-estimate the time and effort it takes for a noobie to bootstrap.  It goes something like this:

1. Read about it, overcome the negative stigma that comes with SR, gambling, etc.
2. Make a small investment using bitinstant
3. Learn a ton about the banking system, chargebacks, how FED creates $.
4. Ask all the noobie questions "why can't someone just [print more bitcoins, steal your wallet, turn off the network, make it illegal]".  What's it backed by anyway? :-)
5. Read enough about it to stress about all the scammers hacked wallets and failed exchanges, etc.
6. Start the KYC process with an exchange that has about 5000 totally obscure and difficult to use ways to deposit money.
7. Tortuously move small chunks of fiat into the exchange
8. start buying
9. freak out about failed exchanges, possibility of USB stick failure, etc
10. start looking at paper/brain wallets
11. Get your head around the idea of actually holding your own money somewhere
12. Create isolated new install VM to make a paper wallet.  You can't outsource this to some client-side web script (if you really want a secure wallet)!
13. TEST the paper wallet concept (requires an entire blockchain sync from scratch).
14. KYC finally comes through!
15. DAMMIT price has doubled :-)

This was my path anyway...

For HNWIs its got to happen with both them AND their advisor (who's gonna do all the work).

So people who might have gotten interested in bitcoin during the Euro financial uncertainty may just now be starting to move from a few hundred BTC trial investment to an actual acquisition strategy.

Well, theoretically at least.

That number is somewhat hypothetical since a wide majority of bitcoins were never sold in the first place.

A better market cap figure would be something like 21M*(all btc ever sold)*(prices they were sold at)/(currently currently issued btc)

Why does the number of people googling bitcoin have to go up for bitcoin to grow?  How often do you search for bitcoin.  I know I haven't in quite some time.  Only new users search for it, not those who have found it.

If google searches were increasing, I'd interpret that as an increase in the rate of adoption.  Right now the rate is a constant slow and steady, which is much healthier anyway.

Agreed.

When "everyone" notices, then that's likely a bubble. When nobody does, then it's an early stage bull market.

Just like the h-omens on the spx the other week... nobody mentioned them, so likely the spx wil go down. Whereas the last time we had h-omens, everybody noticed them and they were front page news, so of course the market went up.

Funny how that works.

At about $10.40 we will break the USD $100M market cap. = O

Well, there could be community growth, I don't know that. But I assumed it doesn't grow (or just very slowly) because of the above indicators.

If google trends were going up it would be easy to explain current prices, but with current situation it is not.
I'd say they community is getting more concentrated, that is people who weren't that interested in bitcoin in the first place are leaving and those who are left are getting more into it. (This is confirmed by the "sites accepting BTC" indicator)

There seem to be two different variables in your logic:

Why is the price groing up? --> people that know bitcoin already are buying more ACCEPTED

Has the community grown? --> Maybe, maybe not. You cannot answer this question with the first one, because it is unrelated to it. You have already discarded the community growth as solution to your first question. It is therefore a separate question.

*just to jerk around a little*

i always figured google trends represented NEW exposure. i cant remember the last time i googled bitcoin personally, so the fact that its trending as much as it is would tell me that the community is growing.

Too be honest I think its well bulls gonna be bulls.

So while the total size of the bitcoin community has stayed the same people who already had BTC were buying some more.
I also think this is the most plausible explanation according to occams razor.