The Bizarre Mystery of Bitcoin’s Missing FOMO: Why Isn’t Anyone Googling BTC?

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Key takeaways:

  • Google search data and app rankings show retail Bitcoin enthusiasm abysmal—morale lower than a February sun.

  • Retail crowds drag their feet, “enthusiasm” arriving fashionably late—after all-time highs, like clockwork.⏰

In that peculiar corner of civilization known as “the market,” the common man tramps behind the vanguard, battered shoe in hand, his wide-eyed optimism arriving days after the parade of all-time highs. Here, in the May of 2025, as Bitcoin’s price teeters on the precipice of $104,000, retail interest flatlines with the stubbornness of a Gulag winter. Public participation, a ghostly specter, is seen only in the trembling of Google’s search bar, which echoes with the emptiness of a Siberian steppe.

Analysts, those fabulists of Wall Street, contend that by 2025, the little man was selling en masse—with cold conviction—while institutional giants gobbled up their spoils, fork and knife in hand. The pattern, as inevitable as Russian bureaucracy, predicts that only after the ticker shouts “$109,350!” will retail sheepstream begin. One week late: an eternal Russian train schedule.

River’s somber calculations reveal 247,000 BTC sold by individuals in 2025. $23 billion—now that’s an imperial number! Meanwhile, Michael Saylor and his “Strategy” swoop like commissars on ration day, acquiring 77% of the 157,000 BTC snapped up by the titans of industry. It’s a cheerful scene, if your definition of “cheerful” includes bread lines and a sense of existential futility.

Retail interest for Bitcoin nears 6-month lows

Observe the charts; search queries for “Bitcoin” have waned to depths not plumbed since June 2024 (an epoch ago, in crypto years), when BTC drifted around $66,000, refusing to poke its tired nose above $73,000. The only thing more stagnant is the queue at the Lubyanka.

The Coinbase app now—hero of democracy’s brave new future—languishes 15th in the US finance rankings, nearly as forgettable as its 20th place last June. Hardly the stampede of peasants storming the Winter Palace, more like a trickle of late arrivals at ration distribution.

And so, when mobile app surges and Google-spawned digital agitation marked the brief festival of Nov. 15, 2024, the world witnessed Coinbase leap from 40th to 5th—two weeks, a flash of frenzy! At that same time, Google’s pitiless algorithm registered the height of public delirium, unmatched in over two years. What social progress! What fleeting insanity!

Coincidence or design? Retail revelry echoed Bitcoin’s escape above its old $73,757 high on Nov. 6, 2024. But as always, by the time the masses awoke to the feast, most morsels had already vanished—and yet, the bullish fever carried Bitcoin higher, reaching $107,000 by the frostbitten days of mid-December.

Buying Bitcoin near an all-time high is a sub-optimal strategy

History repeats, as if written by a tired bureaucrat forced to use carbon paper. Take March 9, 2024: Coinbase, once again, leaps to 4th place in the App Store. Google search queries bloom for six short days after Bitcoin’s record $68,000 daily close. And then—the familiar hangover. BTC had risen 56% in a month, climbing from $43,100 to $68,100. The glorious rally drew the hopeful, who promptly bought in, finding themselves on a rickety boat tossed by “erratic price action” for seven discouraging months. The moral: retail chases yesterday, institutions devour tomorrow. 🍞

Now, with Bitcoin trading just 5.5% beneath all-time highs, the retail exodus is registered by the cold logic of outflows, Google trends, and Coinbase’s position on the App Store’s breadline. It would seem, comrade, that retail excitement arrives only when there is almost nothing left to buy.

This essay, as useless to your financial well-being as a Soviet ruble under hyperinflation, is offered for amusement only. If you seek investment advice, consult the local shaman, as everyone else already has.

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2025-05-15 03:19