Bitcoin’s wild surge and fall has had people flocking around the cryptocurrency. Now fresh data reveals that more people are interested in finding out how bitcoin is doing than the Chinese yuan, or renminbi.

Google search data shows that more people have been searching for the digital currency than the renminbi over the past month, with interest in bitcoin peaking at the height of its price surge on 5 November.

Bitcoin has even begun outstripping interest in the Japanese yen. At the height of its surge it rocketed far ahead of the yen in Google searches, and even now that prices have fallen back dramatically the bitcoin and the yen remain at about the same level.



After a relatively stable year, bitcoin went on a wild tear in October, soaring up 110 per cent in a month to break $500 – a new high for 2015.

It wasn’t to last, however, and less than two weeks on from this record high, the cryptocurrency is trading at $320.

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Charles Hayter from CryptoCompare said to City A.M. that the surge was partly an effect of the EU granting bitcoin VAT exemption in October, and China tightening capital controls, “alongside a general shift in positive sentiment that has been building over the past few weeks that is linked to the growing interest in blockchain technology applications”.

Of course, once other world currencies are added into the equation, interest in bitcoin lags far behind.

Searches for the British pound outnumber bitcoin by a factor of four. And the US dollar, perhaps unsurprisingly, outstrips them all, driving ten times more searches than bitcoin.

Interest in the cryptocurrency is highest in the Netherlands, followed by Ukraine and the Philippines.