How to get a business onto the Bitcoin map

What you will end up with

A business that accepts bitcoin, listed on MappingBitcoin and readable by every other tool built on the same data, submitted by you and checked afterwards to confirm it is actually there.

One thing to state before the recommendation rather than after it: this site's own merchant directory moved to MappingBitcoin, and MappingBitcoin is one of the projects we link from our projects page. That is the connection, and it is why it is named here instead of left for you to find.

MappingBitcoin does not keep a private database of merchants. Its sync documentation describes loading venues from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass API and then following OpenStreetMap's replication feed for changes. The submission form says the same thing in one line under the submit button: "Submitted venues are publicly visible on OpenStreetMap."

That single fact decides everything about how you contribute. You are not filing a record with a company. You are editing the open map that the company reads, and so does everything else built on it. The same record is picked up by BTC Map, the long-running volunteer directory, and by any other tool that reads the same tags. Nobody can revoke it or put it behind an API agreement, which is the reason this is worth an hour of your time rather than five minutes of it.

Before you start

• A business that actually accepts bitcoin, and confirmation from the owner or manager that it does. Not the sign in the window, not what a friend said in 2023.
• Which method they take. On-chain, Lightning, or a contactless Lightning terminal. The form has a separate checkbox for each, and a listing that gets it wrong sends the next person to the till with the wrong wallet.
• A free OpenStreetMap account. The form finishes by handing you to openstreetmap.org to authorise the edit, so the submission is made under your own account and lands in your public edit history. You do not need a MappingBitcoin login or a Nostr key to submit a place: MappingBitcoin's contribution guide says Nostr is required only to attach an image.
• Ten minutes, honestly. The typing is the fast part.

Tested on 20 August 2026 against the live form at mappingbitcoin.com/places/create, which loaded with three steps (About, Location, Details) and finished on a Connect with OSM button, and against btcmap.org and api.btcmap.org, both of which returned data.

The tradeoff you are accepting

You are publishing a claim under your own account that other people will act on. A wrong listing costs the next person a wasted trip and costs the merchant a conversation they did not ask for, and there is no moderation queue standing between your submission and the map. That is the price of a dataset nobody owns.

There is a smaller cost worth naming. An OpenStreetMap edit history is public and tied to your account, so adding the places you frequent leaves a record of where you go.

And one honest limit on what the listing will be worth. Verification exists on MappingBitcoin, but almost nothing carries it yet: on 20 August 2026 its statistics page reported 28,408 merchants across 155 countries and 29 verified businesses. What you are adding is a community claim, the same as almost everything else on the map, until somebody verifies it.

Steps

The form route

1. Confirm with the owner or manager that they accept bitcoin, and ask specifically which method.
2. Open mappingbitcoin.com/places/create.
3. On the About step, type the business name into the name field. It searches existing venues as you type, which is the duplicate check: if the place is already there, stop and edit that listing instead of creating a second one.
4. Choose a category. It is required, and it is what puts the place into the right filter on the categories page.
5. Fill in the contact details: website, phone, email. The email is worth getting right, because it is what the owner will later use to verify the listing.
6. On the Location step, search the address and drag the marker onto the actual building rather than the street. Coordinates are the field every downstream tool trusts most.
7. On the Details step, set the opening hours, tick the payment methods, and answer "Who are you to this place?" with Business Owner, Visited as Customer, or Other. Lightning Contactless, Lightning and On-chain are the bitcoin options; the card options next to them are ordinary OpenStreetMap payment tags and are not what puts a place on a bitcoin map.
8. Select Connect with OSM. You are sent to openstreetmap.org to log in and authorise two permissions: read your basic profile, and write the map changes you submit through the form. Your OpenStreetMap password stays with OpenStreetMap.
9. Return to the Details step and submit.

Connect OSM before you write anything long. MappingBitcoin's own guide warns that edit drafts are not currently restored after the authorisation round trip, so a long correction typed first can be lost on the way back.

The direct route, if you would rather edit the map yourself

Everything above ends as OpenStreetMap tags, and you can add them by hand instead. Sign in at openstreetmap.org, find the business, click Edit, and add:

currency:XBT=yes
payment:onchain=yes
payment:lightning=yes
payment:lightning_contactless=yes

The last three are the methods, added on top of currency:XBT rather than instead of it, and the on-chain tag is payment:onchain rather than the payment:bitcoin you will see used loosely elsewhere. Directories differ on which of these they treat as required. MappingBitcoin's sync documentation lists four it watches for: currency:XBT, payment:bitcoin, payment:lightning and bitcoin. Tagging currency:XBT=yes and the specific method alongside it is the combination least likely to be missed by any of them.

Then add a date, which is the field almost everybody skips. Use survey:date=YYYY-MM-DD if you stood in the shop and checked, or check_date:currency:XBT=YYYY-MM-DD if you confirmed it by phone or from the company's own site. It is the only thing that tells the next reader when a human last looked. Save with a changeset comment saying you confirmed it with the business.

BTC Map also still runs a form, and it works differently: you fill it in and a volunteer makes the OpenStreetMap edit for you, on no fixed timetable. If you would rather not hold an OpenStreetMap account at all, that route exists and it produces the same tags.

Verify it worked

1. Find the edit on openstreetmap.org. It should be in your account's edit history, with the tags spelled exactly. currency:xbt in lower case, or currency:XBT=true, is not the same tag and will not be picked up.
2. Wait, then search MappingBitcoin. The documented sync processes OpenStreetMap diffs every minute and regenerates slugs every five, and the statistics page says the totals refresh hourly, but give it a day before concluding something went wrong.
3. Open the place page and read it back. It should show the category, the address, and a Payment Methods block listing exactly the methods you ticked. If the payment methods are missing, the tags are the thing to check.
4. Check it in a second directory. Search BTC Map for the same place. Turning up in both is the proof that you edited the shared source rather than one company's product, and it is the whole argument for doing it this way.
5. Tell the merchant it is listed. They frequently do not know these directories exist, and a merchant who can see themselves on the map is a merchant who will keep accepting.

If it is your own business, verify it

A listing anybody could have added and a listing the owner has proved is theirs are different objects, and MappingBitcoin's verification page describes three free ways to move from the first to the second: a code emailed to the business address on the OpenStreetMap record, a DNS TXT record on your domain, or a file served from /.well-known/ on your own website. Verification is tied to a Nostr public key, so it needs a Nostr account, and the page names the failure mode itself: if the contact details change on OpenStreetMap there is a 30 day window to re-verify before the badge lapses. The website file is the version that does not depend on the OpenStreetMap fields at all.

The tradeoff is the usual one for key-based identity. The verification belongs to a keypair you control, which means nobody can take it away and nobody can restore it either. Lose the key and you verify again from scratch.

If something goes wrong

The business does not appear after several days. Check the spelling of the tag first; that is the cause the overwhelming majority of the time. Then check the edit actually saved rather than sitting open in the browser.

The OpenStreetMap authorisation was denied or expired. Reconnect and submit again. This is documented behaviour rather than a fault: MappingBitcoin's session and OpenStreetMap's authorisation expire on different clocks.

The submission fails silently. The form runs a bot check, and script blockers stop it. Reload with blocking disabled for the site and try once more.

There are two entries for the same place. Merge them in OpenStreetMap rather than deleting one, so the edit history survives. If you are not confident doing that, leave a note on the node describing the duplication and someone with more experience will handle it.

Another mapper reverts your edit. OpenStreetMap has its own norms, and a bitcoin tag on a business that does not obviously accept payments can look like spam. Reply to the changeset explaining that you confirmed it with the owner and on what date. This is a conversation, not a moderation decision, and it usually resolves.

The business stops accepting bitcoin. Go back and set currency:XBT=no rather than deleting the tag. A no is information and survives; a deleted tag looks identical to a business nobody ever surveyed, and somebody will re-add it in a year. A stale yes is worse for the ecosystem than no listing at all, because it teaches people that the map cannot be trusted, which is the harder thing to repair.

The pipeline that turns these tags into a searchable directory, and the ways each stage of it produces garbage, is described separately.

Correction, 20 August 2026. This post was published as "How to add a business to BTC Map" at /learn/btc-map-org and was written entirely around BTC Map. It now covers submitting through MappingBitcoin, which writes the same record to OpenStreetMap, and it has moved to /learn/add-a-bitcoin-business. Two factual claims changed with it. The earlier version said currency:XBT was the one tag required, stated as a fact about BTC Map that this post no longer asserts on either directory's behalf, and it described the only alternative to hand editing as a form staffed by volunteers. There is now a submission form that connects to your own OpenStreetMap account and writes the edit directly, which is the route described above.

Correction, 20 August 2026. An earlier version of this post said the full dataset could be fetched from btcmap.org/api/venues.json, and described adding a location as clicking a button and watching the submission go live. Neither was accurate: that URL returns 404, BTC Map's API is at api.btcmap.org, and its form route is handled by a volunteer rather than published immediately. Both were corrected at the time.