People Are Googling ‘How to Buy Gold’ More Than Ever Amid the Crypto Crash

Tori Latham
·2 min read
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The crypto bubble has burst, and in its place, people are turning to an old-school form of wealth: gold.

This month, Google searches for the phrase “how to buy gold” reached their highest recorded level, according to Google Trends data cited in The Wall Street Journal. That’s thanks in part to the precious metal’s perceived stability when compared with cryptocurrencies, which have been on a wild ride for the past few years.

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“Even in the worst possible time in the market, gold’s worst will be better than Bitcoin’s worst,” Luis Sousa, a veterinarian in Wales, told the newspaper. In late 2021, he started narrowing his crypto holdings to just Bitcoin, and in early 2022 he started adding gold Britannia coins.

Others are doing the same. Since late 2021, Bitcoin has lost about half of its value, the WSJ noted. As such, crypto investors have started turning away from the currency and placing their bets on a material that has proved its staying power over millennia. In January, for example, sales of American Eagle gold coins reached their highest monthly total in more than a year, according to U.S. Mint data reported in The Wall Street Journal.

That seems to be a good bet. Last year, like crypto, stocks, and bonds experienced double-digit losses. Meanwhile, gold prices stayed pretty much flat. More recently, fears about chaos in the banking sector have led gold-futures prices to soar above $2,000 a troy ounce for the first time in almost a year, close to a record high. In total, gold has an estimated value of $14.5 trillion, compared with crypto’s $1.2 trillion, according to the WSJ.

“I’m not necessarily going to get rich buying gold, but it will hold that money in uncertain times better than a lot of other things,” said Mitch Day, a college student in British Columbia. Plus, “it looks beautiful in and of itself.”

Compared with crypto’s purely virtual existence, that gives gold an aesthetic leg-up, for sure. And the metal’s relatively solid performance just about ensures that people will continue to partake in gold mining long after the Bitcoin mining has come to an end.

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