How many businesses accept bitcoin?
Honest answer: nobody knows the global number, and most pages quoting one are repeating somebody else's guess. Here is the number we can prove, and how we count it.
Why this number is small on purpose
Ranking pages for this question quote thousands of merchants with no dates, no checks, and no removal policy. The lists copy one another until a dead shop can survive online for years. We count differently: a listing exists only after a human verifies the merchant accepts native bitcoin, then it is monitored automatically every day and gets a human look at least every 180 days even if nothing changed. Every vendor page shows its last-verified date, so you can audit the claim yourself. We liveness-checked the directories the ranking guides still recommend. The results explain the gap between the quoted numbers and the real ones.
For physical, walk-in locations, the OpenStreetMap-based BTC Map ecosystem we chart on our world map tracks tens of thousands of pins. That is a different count of a different thing: this page counts online merchants you can order from today.
The verified count, broken down
By category
Top countries
- 🇺🇸 United States95
- 🇩🇪 Germany5
- 🇨🇦 Canada5
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom3
- 🇮🇹 Italy3
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland2
- 🇨🇴 Colombia2
- 🇧🇷 Brazil2
All 20 countries are on the map.
How fresh is the count
6 of the 136 listings were confirmed by a human within the last 30 days, and 136within the last 90. What matters is how recently somebody checked each row, and those dates are public on every listing here. Scraped lists can't tell you that.
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