The Chart That Should Surprise No One: Bitcoin Volatility vs. Search Popularity

We’ve hypothesized about bitcoin’s volatility for a while now as we saw Mt. Gox account verification queues climbing to more than 20K, luxury automobiles purchased with bitcoin, and a series of other link bait articles. It was time to empirically test what was really driving bitcoin’s erratic prices. Hype-Driven Speculators While we won’t jump to assume causality, we will point out the 0.85 correlation coefficient between bitcoin price volatility and expressions of global interest in bitcoin. We constructed this chart by mapping the frequency of global searches for ‘bitcoin’ on google vs. the volatility of bitcoin prices. Since google trend …