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As the next generation of investors will be 18-year-olds immersed in the digital world since childhood, many cryptography advocates believe that bitcoin or another cryptocurrency resource could someday function as "digital gold" by providing people with easy access to market uncertainty and the inefficiency of the central banking system.
Gold sees rebirth as Crypto, Stock Falter
But despite the bitcoin – despite the collapse of this year – is among the best performing resources of recent years, remains firmly in the phase of price discovery and consequently serves mainly as a speculative financial instrument rather than a real deposit of value.
Today's investors, just like their ancestors, still turn to gold and other precious metals in the face of economic uncertainty. Google search data reveals that this remains the case, although a growing cohort of investors indicates that bitcoin is their asset of choice for long-term hodling.
Both Google searches for "gold" and the price of gold itself increased during the fourth quarter due to growing concerns over short-term stock market direction following a prolonged upward trend that could be finally running out of steam. The shares made a historic recovery on Wednesday, but futures slipped after the market closed, suggesting that investors have not yet seen the last part of the crisis.
The "bitcoin" searches, meanwhile, are once again in decline after a moderate recovery from the annual minimum established in October, when the cryptography market has gone through a period of unusual price stability.
In the last 12 months, bitcoin interest has decreased by 80 percent, imitating bitcoin price performance and peak cryptocurrency, which in mid-January was as popular with users as it was in the past few months. Gold, now boasts only 15 percent more research interest in the United States as the yellow metal. Globally, the gap is even more pronounced.
The data on the search terms "buy gold" and "buy bitcoin" tell a similar story. In December 2017, US residents typed "buy bitcoin" into their Google search bars more than six times compared to "buy gold", only to see the terms reach parity only two months after the appearance of the cryptographic bubble. Now, more than a year after the price of bitcoin has reached its all-time high, users are three times more likely to seek information on buying gold than bitcoins.
Bitcoin has the ability to replace gold?
Of course, the news is not so bad for BTC. Even a profound decline in retail interest in cryptocurrency can not prevent "What is bitcoin?" To rank among the leading Google searches of 2018 in the United States and many other large countries, as reported previously by CCN. It is not a recent business due to the severity of the bearish market this year, and indicates that crypto awareness still has significant growth margins as bitcoins aim to become "digital gold".
Moreover, gold itself must at some point come to terms with the unexpected appearance of at least one fundamental bearer, that is to say a new scientific discovery that claims to transform economic and abundant copper into a pseudo-substance. golden that can replace the yellow metal in industrial applications. While most of the gold demand is speculative, a reduction in its use in industrial applications would still have to affect the price of gold as a result, one of the many factors that could support the case of bitcoin as the reserve of value for the digital era.
Shutterstock foreground image. Price graph from TradingView.
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