BTC Map is our attempt to find all Bitcoin-accepting merchants worldwide. We’ve been doing it since 2022, and I’m pretty happy with the results so far. Here are our core KPIs:

Verified Places

All the merchants are supposed to get verified from time to time. Places which were verified more than a year ago are considered outdated. The up-to-date merchants count shows us how many of our places are still reliable. Re-verifying places is a lot of work, so the more places we have, the more effort it takes to keep them up-to-date.

There are currently 6,667 verified places, and we only had ~300 verified places when we started working on BTC Map. Keeping this metric at the current level is challenging enough, but let’s see if we can grow the number of verified places this year.

Total Places

This number includes both verified and outdated places, and we currently have 10,551 places in total. It would be nice to keep all of them up-to-date, that’s basically an upper limit of the verified places metric.

Days Since Verified

As you noticed, the previous numbers have a one-year cutoff threshold. Days since verified is a much more sensitive metric, since it shows the average number of days since the last verification. This number is supposed to grow by one every day, unless you re-verify some places. This metric stands at ~450 days currently, and it’s trailing up. This is concerning, since it shows that our data is getting less reliable every day.

Conclusion

It’s not enough to add Bitcoin-accepting places to the map since every place needs to be maintained and re-verified from time to time. We prefer quality to quantity, and that’s the main reason we’re using those time-sensitive metrics.