WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The volume of online searches conducted for prominent keywords pertaining to bitcoin has produced dramatic growth in 2017, the latest data from Google and Wikipedia shows.
Main keyword groupings attached to bitcoin, such as 'bitcoin price,' 'bitcoin chart,' and 'bitcoin USD' received between one million and ten million searches each month on average during the last year, Google data indicates. This is a ten-fold increase compared to 2016.
The keyword grouping 'bitcoin market' increased in search volume by 900 percent.
Bitcoin was the second most searched global news on Google in 2017.
In Google searches beginning with the words 'How to,' 'How to buy Bitcoin' was in third rank.
Wikipedia published in its annual report the 50 most read articles of last year.
The article on Bitcoin was ranked ninth, and the page was visited 15,026,561 times during 2017.
Traffic for Wikipedia's bitcoin page peaked on December 8, when the price of the digital currency crashed by around 20 percent to $14,000 from the then all-time high of $17,171.
The report describes bitcoin as 'the much-hyped future of money, which has turned into the most speculative intangible asset of all time, while proving totally unsuitable as a means of payment'. Still, over 2017 at least, bitcoin would have been a better investment than Tesla stock, Wikipedia says.
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