According to Google, these are the top 5 most interested countries in Bitcoin.

It's been more than 15 years since Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world, and a lot has happened in that time frame. The pyramid scheme went from being called rat poison (squared) and being called dead hundreds of times, to becoming a trillion dollar fortune with a dozen exchanges tracking the performance of the world's largest financial market.

Recently, the upward trend of the Internet adoption curve since 1997 has seen some variations, but the overall trend is very promising. Google Trends data shows that retailers are slowly returning to the scene, but some countries are more inclined to seek the mainstream cryptocurrency than others. Here are the top 5.

The province of El Salvador

It probably won't come as a surprise to anyone, but the first country on Google's query list is El Salvador. After all, the tiny Central American country made headlines in 2021 when it became the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender.

Since then, BTC political leader Naib Bukele and his administration have outlined a number of Bitcoin-related initiatives, including vets in cryptocurrency payments, volcanic bonds, and mining excess volcanic energy.

Last but not least, El Salvador has been quietly collecting BTC for the past few years. The country went through the worst bear market of 2022 and survived several attacks by international organizations such as the IMF, which criticized its approach to Bitcoin.

According to the data from this tracker, the Buckele-led country currently has $400 million worth of BTC.

Nigeria follows suit.

The African country has been battling high inflation for years and has blamed the cryptocurrency industry (and Binance) for devaluing the fiat currency at the same time. Additionally, the government imposed a ban on banks to stop serving cryptocurrency customers, which was finally lifted at the end of last year.

Despite this controversy, Nigerians have always loved Bitcoin and other digital assets as shown by many studies. Google Trends data supports this thesis as Nigeria ranks second in Bitcoin interest.

Who is in the top 5?

Although the presence of El Salvador and Nigeria is somewhat expected, given that BTC is legal in the first country and the second one is struggling with inflation, the other three of the five are very surprising. This is mainly because they come from Europe and have strong economies – Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Austria.

Not much is said or written about the adoption levels of Liechtenstein and Austria, but Switzerland holds the most pro-crypto countries, or at least some local regions.

There are several crypto exchange trading products on the Swiss market, a local bank offers shares for various assets, and the canton of Zug allows certain payments to be made in Bitcoin and Ethereum.