The state of bitcoin directories.

The community successor to Coinmap and the clear winner for physical locations: tens of thousands of merchants on OpenStreetMap data, open API, active local communities, and per-location survey dates. If you want to spend bitcoin in person near you, use BTC Map — it is the best tool ever built for that job. Its scope is physical places by design (OpenStreetMap maps the physical world), so online-only stores sit outside it.

The original crowdsourced merchant map, and for years the default answer. It has been discontinued — coinmap.org now serves its operator's exchange landing page, not a merchant map. Guides that still say "check Coinmap" are recommending a tool that no longer exists; the community's map lives on at BTC Map.

The product-search engine for bitcoin commerce ("search millions of things you can buy with bitcoin"). As of our last check its homepage fails to respond at all, and archived copies of its pages still cite anchor merchants that shut down years ago. It is still linked from several high-ranking "where to spend bitcoin" resources, which is exactly why this page exists.

An early directory some articles still cite for its claimed database of merchants. The domain no longer responds to connections at all.

A former acceptance directory whose domain now redirects to an unrelated gambling site. A cautionary tale for old bookmarks: a dead directory's domain doesn't stay parked forever. We deliberately don't link it.

The closest thing to an online-store directory that survived: a community catalog of Lightning-accepting websites ranked by user votes. It remains useful for discovery, but listings don't display verification dates, and the catalog mixes physical-goods stores with apps, services, and gambling sites — so expect to vet what you find.

A large self-submission catalog spanning many cryptocurrencies, bitcoin among them. Scale is its pitch; the trade-off is that listings don't show per-merchant verification recency, so staleness is hard to judge from the outside.

The payment processors maintain the freshest big-brand lists — this is where you find which household names take bitcoin at checkout. By design they list merchants on their own payment rails, so independent merchants using other setups (BTCPay, native Lightning) don't appear.

Where this site fits: an online-store-first directory of independent merchants selling real goods for bitcoin. Every listing is checked by a human on a rolling 90-day cycle with the verification date shown on the card, the data is open (JSON API, RSS, MCP server), and there are no listing fees. It is deliberately curated rather than huge — the pitch is that nothing on it is dead.