Bitcoin Forum

I was a bit surprised when I saw this data for countries with most Bitcoin maximalist searches.
Data is presented by blockchaincenter website with using of google search information.

https://i.imgur.com/hCUEfzq.png

As you can see most bitcoin maximalist (searchers) are located in Africa and South America, and Kenya is the first on the list.
Only Germany and Poland made it in top10 from Europe, and there is no USA here.

More interesting data can be found on this website.
For example we can see that Bitcoin dominance is more than 80% compares to all other altcoins.
That is even more dominant than we can see on most marketcap websites.

https://i.imgur.com/WkBWWcc.png


One more interesting thing I noticed:  ;D

source: https://www.blockchaincenter.net/cryptocurrency-world-map/?crypto=BTC;

If Bitcoin's google search dominance is at 80% while its market dominance is at 65%, it likely means that alts are overpriced and are bound to drop further, because they lack real users. I think the difference between the most maximalist countries and the average Bitcoin interest isn't that high, so there's not much point to dig deeper as to why Kenya or Brazil are more interested in BTC than alts.

Wait. So this data is gained by looking at Google searches with the "Bitcoin maximalist" search query. How did you conclude with this data that most bitcoin maximalists are located in Africa and South America though? What if they're just doing a Google search of "Bitcoin maximalist" just because they want to know what "Bitcoin maximalist" means? Or is there something I'm missing here?

As I said in first post it is google data for most 'Bitcoin' search terms.
That does not mean that in that country lives most Bitcoin maximalists, but most people from there search for 'Bitcoin' in google  ;D
More detailed explanation on sourced website: https://www.blockchaincenter.net/cryptocurrency-world-map/?crypto=BTC;

Your initial statements literally said "As you can see most bitcoin maximalist are located in Africa and South America"; hence my confusion. :P Anyway, thanks for the edit and for clearing things up.

That is because majority of people that search which I am very sure they are newbie do not know any other coin than bitcoin. In fact most of them do not know the difference between bitcoin and altcoin but when they do, they interact more by using altcoin especially people that are looking for free coin. If you visit https://www.keywordshitter.com/ and input "Bitcoin" in the search query and take the analysis of the first 1000 phrase keywords generated, you will understand more about what I am saying.

I think bitcoin is a real temptation for poor countries because even a fraction of bitcoin represents a big amount of money for them. I'm from México and for me, 1 bitcoin represents $200,000 pesos. so, with 2 bitcoins i can even buy a house here. Or pay cheap rent of $120 dollars for a nice house with a garden. What we can do in the first world with 1 bitcoin isn't much but in the third world we can have a nice life with that amount.

Search dominance does not co-relate to market dominance.

Search means - How many people are inquiring or trying to find out about a particular product.
Market Dominance - In simple words means  a measure of the strength of a brand or a product.

We should be happy that atleast the citizens of these countries want to know about Bitcoin, whether they are investing in it or not is a complete different situation.

Sitting here trying to come up with some sort of correlation for all of these numbers and countries and the outlier right away that makes it difficult is Germany.  I wold say at first glance, most of these countries are on the poorer side, and have less to invest, and so they aren't simply spreading their dollars out and in heavy numbers..but Germany, and I could be off a bit, but I do believe is handily Europe's most wealthy Nation/economy ..so that throws off my assumption. I think this kind of info is interesting too...I use Google Trends often myself to gauge the markets both crypto and traditional ..can tell you a lot more than people realize.

They lack real users because there is often nothing to use. The vast majority of altcoins are vaporware - flashy websites, nice sounding whitepapers and roadmaps, big announcements, but no functioning blockchain, no working product, and no real world use. Simply empty promises and free money for the creators.

I think the opposite. The longer people spend in the cryptocurrency space, the more they realize that the vast majority of altcoins are complete scams, and they are better off just sticking to bitcoin.

Quite satisfying to see BCash just barely scraping above the 1% cut off, and BSV not making it at all.

I had always thought it was the other way around. Bitcoin price makes a big move upwards, which drives more news and media coverage, which leads people to search for "bitcoin" or related terms. I'd be surprised if Google trends predicts price movements.

And people also google about altcoins when they become interested in them. If most people decide to stop with Bitcoin instead of pursuing alts, that's because Bitcoin is clearly superior. I'm sure everyone who is new to Bitcoin quickly knows that alts exist.


It does, just because correlation isn't super strong, it doesn't mean that it isn't there.


True for ICOs and some new altcoins, but I meant the established coins. I never encountered coins like DASH or EOS in the wild - never saw anyone accepting them or even talking about them outside of crypto community.

Wow, there seems to be lots of people from Africa that are interested in cryptocurrency, but yet a lot of cryptocurrency companies are not launching their services there :o. Seriously, they should start putting more focus in Africa and try to launch there as well, and not only in the developed countries. By doing all that we can help to develop these countries and make them bigger.

In the worldwide search interest, there is nothing there to be surprised about. I already knew that Bitcoin will be on top the list followed by Ethereum and XRP. Most people make use of Bitcoin for transactions than they do with any other.

Interesting analysis. I think it's nothing surprising to see such big Bitcoin dominance over altcoins, actually it would be strange to see opposite numbers. In general, there is very few altcoins which is actually are being used as currency. While majority altcoins don't have actual use, so it's nothing strange that interest in it is minimal. And it's a bit strange that Dogecoin is still quite popular on search engine. More popular than Bitcoin SV :)
On the other hand, on this article we can see table with countries where altcoins dominate in Google, having total number between 66% and 76%. It's Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, European Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Ireland and poor Venezuela. Interesting, why altcoins is so popular there.

Most of top countries are from Africa or Latin Ameria continents. They will be truly new forces with potentially huge momentum to help Bitcoin taking off to the Moon and hitting $1mil. soon. The financial crisis in Latin American nations and the lack of traditional financial access in Africa force locals find other alternatives. It is good for bitcoin to see locals choose it as their alternative for now and likely for the future.

Google search is probably not enough to make a list of countries and call them 'Bitcoin maximalist countries'. In countries where people usually Google Bitcoin rather than other cryptos it probably means that while they are curious, they are largely unaware about the whole market and have only heard of the king. I also don't quite understand the methodology of this research and what was taken into account here. I'm not surprised my country is #1 multiple times when it comes to altcoins, but I don't understand why the US did not make it to any list.

Proud to see my country top this list. Unlike the popular view, nothing is happening in Africa in connection to Bitcoin, a lot is happening, and maybe not as the rest of the world would perceive Bitcoin. Largely, in Africa, lots of transactions are carried out through peer to peer platforms, no wonder just in the month of May Localbtc and Paxful recorded most transactions on the continent placing Africa second to North America. Some of the reasons leading to this upsurge in Africa may be found in this article https://coinweez.com/bitcoin-peer-to-peer-trading-in-africa/.
It is true a lot of people don't really understand what Bitcoin is and the surface is not yet scratched and when people get in the know we will see the real application of Bitcoin in Africa. However, companies trooping in especially foreign ones need to understand the dynamics of Africa and not import models externally, history has proven this does not work and "maybe just maybe" it won't work with Bitcoin.

Sure.
I don't use google search myself (so I am not counted in), and this statistic can be viewed in many different ways, so I don't take them as pure facts, more as an indication.

It applies to most(and when I say most I mean like 99%) both old and new altcoins. Even "established" coins such as Cardano(ADA), which as been out since like 2015, still doesn't do crap 5 years later. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I actually find the list of Top Altcoin countries more interesting and wonder about what relevance each Altcoin has to the respective country.

IOTA being large in Germany and Austria makes sense, after all they are based in Germany and have (or had) partnerships with German industry.

DOGE being top in Bangladesh makes sense as well, because of course it is.

With the rest I really do wonder though.



Can we please make the term "bitcurious" a thing?

o_e_l_e_o said that most altcoins don't have a functioning blockchain or working product, which isn't true for "established" coins, since they are officially launched and have at least some of the advertised features enabled. But this only makes things worse, since they fail to attract users with features that they have. Many of them can be given a status of zombie-coin - their devs make it seem like there's a lot of activity going on with development, but on practice it moves nowhere.

In Venezuela the monthly wage is about 2 USD. With what an American may spend for a pizza, you can probably feed a family a whole month here. Granted, they won't be eating pizza, mostly grain and the occasional sausage if lucky; but still, its a tremendous difference.

However you are looking at it wrongly. Bitcoin is good because of several reasons, that particular one not being one. 1 bitcoin does not exist, what exists, is, really, 100 million satoshis. The code does not distinguish the bitcoin unit, only the satoshi, the rest is fiction.

You might as well say 100 million satoshis. So, with 200 million satoshis you could buy a house there. It is really the same thing, but mostly psychological i guess.

But no, what matters is that bitcoin is not going to lose its value over time, unlike fiat, which is under the yoke of inflation, induced or not. One of the dogmas of the school of Chicago is, to never let money keep its value, or people will stop spending and/or getting in debt, and they are very very scared of this, because their flawed model doesn't work otherwise, and they never bothered to study the Austrian school of economy that rips them apart.

Sadly the whole world thinks only the Chicago school is true, even the misled leftists which antagonize it with the much worse State should replace the people mindset (free market vs central planned economy).

Mexican economy is going down, but you have flee into Bitcoin, before your fiat drags you faster than you will have time to react. Keeping pesos is dangerous, while keeping bitcoin is not. Heck, even keeping US dollars is dangerous, Trump thinks he is invincible, and that the USD can be printed ad infinitum, but one day it will blow up and dwarf the housing crisis or covid-19...

And yes, your gov will probably "invent" the new peso, say a million of the current one s 1 new peso (haven't you had those before?) but this is fiction. We have had 2 of those in the last decade, it often happens to hyperinflation economies. And, we are used to express menial things in millions anyway. We have a very bad joke here, we are "millionaires" (when a million can only buy you some milk or bread at most). Min wage is actually just 400000 VES, but it'l get into the millions soon, like it did in 2018 with the VEF.

Its an illusion, and that particular thing (zeroes, either left or right) doesn't make something "better" (it doesn't).
Giving its closeness its far easier to express bitcoin price in satoshis in our local currency. According to Localbitcoins, the exchange is about 18~19 VES per satoshi. See? Simple. Get used to it...