Table of Contents
Merchant Reviews
I bet most bitcoiners are aware of the concept of revealed preferences, and we noticed that many BTC Map users are abusing our merchant verification form and leave place reviews instead of short notes on how they verified a merchant in question.
Here is a couple of examples:
How did you verify this?
I went and got my haircut after hearing about the adoption that was happening here in Arnhem. There was the business owner and one of his employees. The employee didn’t know that they accepted bitcoin but luckily since the owner was there - he assured him that they do. Mission success for a haircut and a shave.
How did you verify this?
The level of customer service of this restaurant is excellent 10/10
We have hundreds of reviews like the ones above, and it’s clear that many bitcoiners want to share their experience and add some context to certain locations. Since those reviews aren’t properly organized, it will take some time to extract old reviews from our archives and make them public. As a next step, I think we should add a dedicated review button with a Lightning paywall in order to filter out spam reviews.
Trending Countries
- Brazil - 173 changes
- Netherlands - 101 changes
- Italy - 84 changes
- Australia - 67 changes
- Czechia - 52 changes
- Germany - 50 changes
- Portugal - 45 changes
- Suriname - 42 changes
- United States of America - 32 changes
- United Kingdom - 27 changes
Brazil is keeping its lead in Bitcoin adoption with 36 new and 121 re-verified places. It has 1,062 Bitcoin merchants in total, and 729 of them have been recently verified.
Netherlands is one of the first centers of Bitcoin adoption, with a famous Arnhem Bitcoin City, which have been boosting Bitcoin adoption since 2014. It looks like August was a busy month in the Netherlands, and now it has 50 more Bitcoin merchants.
Italy is a big country with many Bitcoin-accepting merchants, but most of them are outdated, so we can’t be certain that all the data is reliable. Italian bitcoiners are working on solving this issue, and they were able to re-verify 71 merchant in August.
Big thanks to Rockedf for contributing to almost every region!
Trending Communities
- Bitcoin Island Philippines - 97 changes
- Satoshi Spritz - 87 changes
- Bitcoin é aqui! Rolante/Riozinho-RS-BRASIL - 81 changes
- Einundzwanzig Deutschland - 51 changes
- Einundzwanzig Portugal - 45 changes
- Free Madeira - 29 changes
- Einundzwanzig Schweiz - 21 changes
- Dezentralschweiz - 21 changes
- Bitcoin Association Switzerland - 21 changes
- Bitcoin Sydney - 17 changes
Bitcoin Island Philippines has many outdated locations, and most of them no longer accept bitcoins. Removing outdated merchants is very important, thanks ctboss for cleaning this region in August!
As you can see, we only have 10 communities with 17 or more changes during the last 30 days, which is concerning. We clearly need to find more ways to reach out to unmaintained communities and encourage them to keep their data up to date and onboard more merchants.
Global Metrics
The number of verified merchants has dropped from 6,900 to 6,879 (-0.3%), which means that we need more contributors if we want all the regions to stay up-to-date. We’re talking about ~20 additional verifications a month, which can be done even by a single dedicated contributor.
The total number of merchants has increased from 11,532 to 11,687 (+1.3%), which is in line with our long-term trend. The stream of new merchants has no signs of tapering, we’re just struggling to maintain the old ones in certain regions.
The average number of days since the last verification has increased from 309 to 322 (+4.2%), which means that our data is now significantly less reliable than it was a month ago. This is yet another confirmation that our main bottleneck is the lack of local maintainers.
Conclusion
Merchant adoption has no signs of slowing down, and we’re working on providing BTC Map users with all the relevant tools to discover and maintain their local Bitcoin merchant data. I believe that collecting and displaying place reviews can help us highlight the best places and give users more confidence in our data set.
The best way to help us is to re-verify some outdated locations in your area, if you have any: