In regards to price, the worlds biggest cryptocurrency, bitcoin, had a really strong period between April second and May 14th this year. After having hovered around $4,000 for just over a month, the price went up to around $5,000 in just a few days. After this, the gains continued with new year-highs almost every day until May 14th when the price reached $8,000.
However, $8,000 seems to be extra hard to break through, and with excluding two clear dips the price has stayed around $8,000 for the last two weeks.
Google searches have declined drastically
This period of stagnation also seems to have brought a decline in the over-all interest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If you look at the popularity for the search term “bitcoin”, it is quite clear that the interest increased when the bitcoin price increased, but after the year-high on May 14th, the amount of searches has declined quite a lot despite the fact that the price has stayed around $8,000.
Google searches for the term “bitcoin” between March 26th and May 26th. Source: Google Trends
According to cryptocurrency expert and former journalist Totte Löfström, the decreasing interest could be the result of less media attention for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
“Big main-stream media outlets demand clear changes to be interested enough to write about a topic. Media outlets often have limited resources and therefore has to prioritize what they choose to report on. If the price of bitcoin, for example, sky rockets in a short amont of time it will catch attention from the news outlets. But if the price stays steady at the same level for some time there are almost always more interesting topics to report on”, Totte Löfström writes in a comment to Trijo News.
He also adds that less attention for bitcoin and a stagnated price could be connected to each other as well.
“When the media outlets report on big increases in price, it tends to attract new and inexperienced investors to buy bitcoin. These are generally less price sensitive and tend to drive the price even further up. This is for example what we saw during the cryptocurrency bubble that formed during 2017”.
Google searches for the term “bitcoin” for the last two years. Source: Google Trends.
Bitcoin competes with other big news events such as the trade war between the US and China
When the prices have stagnated and the big main-stream media outlets instead choose to report on other big news events, like the trade war between the US and China or the election to the European Union Parlament, the influx of new buyers tends to dry up, according to Totte Löfström. This worsens the situation even more.
But despite the decreasing interest for the last two week, Totte Löfström believes that we could be seeing a turn-around quite soon.
“Right now, there are probably lots of journalist from all over the world keeping an extra eye on what is happening to bitcoin – they are most likely many times more than they were just a few months ago. So even if we see less reporting at the moment when the prices have stagnated, the threshold for reporting is probably a lot lower than before. I believe it would be full enough if some big investor decided to buy a couple of thousand bitcoins, and thereby drive the price up to perhaps around $9,000. If this happens, most big media outlets around the world would probably report on the event. And this could, in turn, make the rally continue even further.
