Bitcoin craze: Google gives bitcoin currency status & converter

The first search result that popped up when we typed 'bitcoin' in Google's search bar was a currency conversion tool showing the Indian Rupees equivalent of the value of bitcoin in real time. Clearly, this is what majority of people are searching for right now. One might have thought that the first search result would be a description of the cryptocurrency and its history but that is old hat now. Google has also added 'Bitcoin' in its menu of currencies- right between the Bhutanese ngultrum and the Bolivian boliviano.



What is more, as of now other prominent digital currencies like Ethereum, Ripple, and Lite Coin do not feature in Google's list of currencies.

You can also find out how much your bitcoins are worth in Indian rupee terms by using Google's nifty calculator.


How about the bitcoin versus the US dollar? You can get that too. You can get the exchange rate of the bitcoin against any currency in the world using this tool, like you would for any other traditional one.


If you click on the 'Disclaimer' button you see where Google has sourced the information from. There you will see that bitcoin figures in the 'Currencies' section, and that the information is sourced from Coinbase, a digital asset broker, where the price shown comes with a delay of three minutes.


Finance minister Arun Jaitley and the Reserve Bank of India might be advising people to avoid this new entrant but people are clearly not listening. Something that most people had not even heard about till say two years ago is now a chart buster - the fastest growing 'startup' of all. Here is another interesting trend. According to Google Trends, number of searches for 'bitcoin investing' had overtaken 'stock investing' between November 26 and December 2.


Now, Google may have got the burger emoji wrong by putting the cheese below the patty, but it sure seems to have a first mover advantage here. We searched to see if the likes of Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance have also added bitcoin along with other currencies. So far, they haven't. Well, maybe by the time financial regulators around the world announce it as legal tender and we trade and transact using bitcoins, Sundar Pichai and his team can say, "We did it first. We put the bitcoin in our currency list between the Bhutanese ngultrum and the Bolivian boliviano way before anyone else."