It seems that bitcoin is officially growing in popularity in Ireland, as the most recent Central Bank of Ireland Consumer Protection Bulletin has a small section in their recent report which mentions it.
As part of their social media monitoring of financial services, they put out the following figures, which mainly relate to finance.
The Central Bank’s monitoring of social media shows:
- In the second half of 2016, the Central Bank observed a total of 3,716 online mentions relating to financial products and services in Ireland – an average of 143 mentions per week.
- 84% of these mentions expressed dissatisfaction.
- Account administration was the most common cause of mentions expressing dissatisfaction (69.1%) followed by customer service (12.7%) and fees and charges (9.4%).
- The banking sector represented 98.2% of mentions expressing dissatisfaction.
- Most mentions not related to dissatisfaction, concerned technological developments (FinTech) in payment services (47.2%), followed by mentions concerning banking products and providers (25.3%), and those related to Bitcoin/Blockchain (15.5%)
Doing the maths on this, this means that there were 576 mentions of bitcoin and blockchain over the period measured.
