The query “Buy Bitcoin” has been searched more than “Buy Gold” on the world’s largest search engine, data from Google trends show. We experienced this trend in November 2016 and earlier this year as shown in the graph below.

The October Google Trends data is confirmed by news from “the real world”. BullionVault, a London-based trading platform for gold and silver, reported a decrease in interest for the physical gold by almost 27% for sellers and 10% for buyers in October.

A spike in demand especially from Japanese and South Korean investors has fueled the recent bitcoin rally. Bitcoin has already been adopted as a feasible payment option in Japan and is slowly becoming an alternative to stocks, equity, precious metals, and perhaps even fiat money.