Is Bitcoin price correlated with Google search volume?

BitYields

• 2 min read

There's an old conspiracy on the Internet which states that you can estimate the price of any asset judging the demand curve it has on Google.

This thought experiment had me hooked also for quite some time, but the difficulties in operating with the "API" (it's not an actual API) of Google Trends have been stopping me from executing this for long time (primarily because Google Trends tends to block your IP after several innocuous requests).

But, after using some clever user agent masking and playing with the latest version of matplotlib today I'm finally able to share with you the results:

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Chart: "bitcoin" keyword on Google (blue) and $BTC price (1 year)
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Explanations

This is a chart, programmatically takes with Python and matplotlib both values from Google Trends (Keyword: "bitcoin", period: last 365 days, plotted on the right axis) and BTC price (currency: USD, period: last 365 days, plotted on the left axis) and merges the two plots in a single scale y plot. Please be aware, 0 means "no search interest" and 100 stands for "maximum search interest".

So, the question remains: Is BTC price related to people who search for it or not?

The conclusions I leave to you.

Future work

As noted by others, its appropriate to take the first and second derivative of both functions in order to better visualize the correlation degree.

P.S: Check out this post on Reddit at /r/dataisbeautiful too, where its coupled with many insightful comments.

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DISCLAIMER: The content of this webpage is not an investment advice and does not constitute any offer or solicitation to offer or recommendation of any investment product.

Reference:

  1. Google Trends, Web search volume for word "Bitcoin" (Period: 2018 - 2023, Location: Worldwide): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=bitcoin
  2. Bitcoin price in USD, Coinmarketcap : https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin
  3. Software visualization: Python-PK, PyTrends, Matplotlib