It’s been a year since we started working on BTC Map, and the results are promising. We started with a legacy dataset of more than 8,000 Bitcoin-accepting merchants, and we had to verify them all. More than 90% of those merchants turned out to be out of business or no longer accept bitcoins.

Now we have about 8,500 verified merchants, and we have a few proven ways of keeping that data up-to-date. Perhaps even more importantly, we encouraged people to create location-based communities. I was initially sceptical towards this idea, but well-managed communities can offer tremendous benefits to the local bitcoiners and travelers alike, and they will be the centers of coordinated pushback when shit hits the fan and governments turn openly hostile to Bitcoin.