In the past year, numerous businesses all over the world have entered the bitcoin economy by allowing its customers to pay for the goods or services in the digital currency. This way, they save money on credit and debit card transaction fees and get a little bit of publicity from the bitcoin community.
Despite the recent setbacks in the world of bitcoin, the virtual currency is flourishing within the marketplace. According to Coinmap.org, a website that allows users to search for bitcoin businesses within their vicinity, there are now 4,127 establishments accepting bitcoins and some litecoins (at the time of this writing) appearing on its map.
In the United States, bitcoin operations can be found all over the country, including New York, Minnesota, Florida, the Midwest and California. North of the border in Canada, bitcoin isn’t as ubiquitous. The virtual currency can be located all over Europe and East Asia.
One can peruse the long list of merchants, which is in alphabetical order. The data is updated each hour.
A point to make is that some businesses might not even know the website exists so the amount of physical bitcoin businesses could very well be a lot higher than the reported figure. It is also important to note that the list only consists of brick-and-mortar companies and not the immense number of online businesses.
Indeed, it’s not a total representation of bitcoin internationally, but it does provide a nice snapshot for the community to understand its global reach.
