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 — lists that 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, and it is re-checked on a rolling 90-day cycle. 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 quoted numbers and 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 — a different, complementary 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 States88
- 🇩🇪 Germany5
- 🇨🇦 Canada5
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom3
- 🇮🇹 Italy3
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland2
- 🇨🇴 Colombia2
- 🇿🇦 South Africa1
All 20 countries are on the map.
Freshness, not just size
35 of the 128 listings were confirmed by a human within the last 30 days, and 127within the last 90. A directory's honest size is not how many rows it has — it is how many rows somebody recently checked. That is the claim no scraped list can make.