Possible identification of Satoshi Nakamoto and Consensus Conference in New York seem to have boosted general interest to bitcoin. People now search it in Google as often as they did over the Mt. Gox collapse.

According to Google Trends (see the table below), the first days of May saw a dramatic growth of interest to bitcoin among Google users. This May, people make search enquiries about the cryptocurrency with the same intensity as they did in February 2014 when the closure of Mt. Gox caused the first big “bitcoin hype” in mainstream media.

On the other hand, the related term “blockchain” does not show any significant growth in search intensity.

Bitcoin started making the headlines again early in May, after the claims by Craig Wright were published that he should be associated with the personality of the bitcoin “founding father” Satoshi Nakamoto.

Wright published his allegations on BBC, Bloomberg and some other media. The event gained extra publicity when former Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen supported Wright’s claim for the title. On the other hand, several prominent members of the community were not impressed by Wright’s assertions and the “cryptographic proof” he provided, and refuted his claim.

The long Labour Day weekend in Europe and the US contributed to the popularity of the story: it does not leave the main pages of many mainstream news sites ever since. Thus, CoinFox has been observing it on the Bloomberg front page from 1 to 3 May daily. Quite unusually, however, the media hype has not had an immediate effect on the price of bitcoin, which fluctuated around $450 all through the Labor Day weekend.

Another factor that contributed to the media hype may have been the Consensus 2016 blockchain conference organised by CoinDesk, which takes place in New York on 2-4 May. This is the second time the company launches the event. This year, headline speakers included Lawrence Summers, Glenn Hutchins, Jack Markell, Balaji Srinivasan and David Rutter, reads CoinDesk website. Watch this space for a CoinFox review of the conference to be published soon.