“I will be watching for signs of the durability of this latest Bitcoin bottom. If search interest wanes quickly, I will expect the recovery phase to fizzle relatively quickly like last time. If search interest remains robust, I will accordingly expect the recovery period to last longer.”

This is what I wrote on January 18, 2018 when I last reviewed the correlations between Google search activity and Bitcoin price moves. Search interest did continue to wane from that point. Bitcoin’s price followed suit as the cryptocurrency failed to secure a bottom. At the time of writing, BTC is struggling to hold onto the $6000 price level.

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) broke down below uptrending 200DMA support last week. Now it threatens a weak support level around $5500.

Source: Yahoo Finance

As the chart below shows, the Google Search index quickly dropped all the way from 72 on January 18th to the low 30s before it bottomed out.

Search interest in Bitcoin waned quickly after the cryptocurrency lost its struggle with the psychologically important $10,000 level.

Source: Google Trends

The next question is whether the latest bout of selling is attracting fresh interest? The answer is a qualified “yes.”

Zooming into the last 7 days, Google Trends shows data through midnight on February 5th. The search activity has been on the rise for a day and a half. The second peak in the above chart occurred on February 2nd. The chart below shows activity in the past 36 hours or so has likely soared past that level of interest.

Google search interest in Bitcoin is on a sustained rise again.

Source: Google Trends

The data are insufficient to compare to the peak from January 17; that data will come in another day or so. If the search interest surpasses that level, I believe that will be enough to call search interest at an extreme. Per the budding theory, that extreme would signal a change in price direction for Bitcoin if the price is still plunging at the same time…thus helping to generate a (short-term?) bottom that has as yet proven so elusive.

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