Thanks to enthusiasm from the hard-libertarian/Free State folks, New Hampshire has long seemed to be a hotbed of bitcoin/cryptocurrency/blockchain enthusiasm. So I was surprised that the consumer-finance site RewardExpert ranked us as just 24th on the list of Top States Where Cryptocurrency is Catching On.
(Yes, this is one of those rank-the-states-according-to-publicly-accessible-data-because-ranked-lists-get-attention exercises that I often scorn. But it seems more legitimate, or at least more interesting, than most.)
The organization liked our “infrastructure”, a category where we were No. 2. They counted “bitcoin ATMs, vendors, and establishments accepting it as payment, etc as a proxy for use value and usability” of cryptocurrency in general. The Free Staters can take credit here: They’ve been pushing bitcoin ATMs, and publicizing bitcoin-taking businesses, for years.
But we were only No. 26 in “interest in cryptocurrency” and No. 23 in “interest in cryptocurrencies” (plural) based on Google traffic data at a state level. The organization said it “analyzed keywords like “cryptocurrency,” “Bitcoin,” and “Ethereum” to determine where people were searching the most for these terms, both as an aggregate and for the individual terms. So for example, Washington state residents showed a particularly high interest in the cryptocurrency Ethereum.”
So far as I could tell they didn’t measure things like legislation or regulation, where I think New Hampshire would rank pretty high, or presence of cryptocurrency-related businesses, where we might not do as well.
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