@ saunter
2025-02-17 06:42:38
Originally posted on Nostr: https://highlighter.com/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpklqvpdfcuch9wkh2gary7erd4275jmrf6qw0z5sz0dhj8u06kevqyvhwumn8ghj7urjv4kkjatd9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wshszxrhwden5te0ve5kcar9wghxummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhszythwden5te0dehhxarj9emkjmn99uqzqjn0d9hz6argv5k57ur9dck5y6t5vdhkjm3df4shqtt5xduxz6tsrdmw7l
I care deeply about bitcoin adoption and ability to use bitcoin with all features of money — saving, spending, earning. We're entering an age where more and more people realise "hodl never spend" meme is hindering bitcoin adoption. More and more of use want to use bitcoin in everyday life, because we're living on it and because it's superior in every aspect. It's also incredibly fun to use it for payments.
For money to thrive, it needs to circulate. Spending bitcoin orangepills merchants, their families and people around them — with each bitcoiner coming to a shop and paying with bitcoin, it's a point of contact that can trigger a train of though that later may fruit into action — "_Why are they so interested in bitcoin, what's actually so special about it?_" "_Hmm, maybe this time I will not exchange it for fiat immediately?_"
Global merchant adoption grows, every day new business around the world decide to start accepting bitcoin payments. Circular economies are blooming on all continents, where people live in a new, experimental, orange coin paradigm. Companies and projects like Blink, Bitcoin Jungle, Plan B, Orange Pill App do an amazing job in facilitating this — providing great wallets, tools & services for merchants, and finally onboarding merchants themself. They also often support circular economies financially or in other ways. This is very valuable and makes the road to hyperbitcoinization a tad shorter.
But there is one thing those companies are doing wrong — they're using their own, proprietary maps that display only merchants using their own wallets or POS software. I'd like to now list a few reasons why those great projects should migrate their maps into an open source, bitcoin map that is BTC Map.
## Open source, stupid
[BTCmap](https://btcmap.org/) is open source, built on OpenStreetMaps, open to both developers contributions but also for map taggers (called [shadowy supertaggers](https://www.openstreetmap.org/)). Anyone can contribute, even If you don't code. Anyone can verify merchants or add new merchants to the map. BTC Map team developed [a neat system of verifications](https://btcmap.org/verify-location) that just works better than anything before or any alternative maps today.
## Many apps, one map
BTC Map is integrated inside a dozen of wallets and apps, to name a few: Wallet of Satoshi, Coinos, Bitlocal, Fedi or Aqua. It's a public good that any bitcoin product can use and grow it's network effect.
## Uniting mappers' work
BTC Map does not discriminate bitcoin merchants, that means all the merchants from proprietary maps are being mapped by taggers to BTC Map. By mapping on a closed source, proprietary map, the same merchant is mapped two times, usually by two different people — it's duplicating the same work without any bringing any benefit to both projects. Using BTC Map also brings you way more people verifying If those merchants actually still accept bitcoin, making it easier to have an up-to-date database of actual adoption.
## More bitcoin spent at your merchants
When you have a business focused on spending bitcoin and onboarding merchants, you want as much bitcoin spent there as possible. If a bitcoiner coming to the area does not use your own map but some other map, they can be completely unaware that they can let their sats flow to your merchants. If we all use one merchants database, this problem disappears and more sats will flow. Why wouldn't you want your merchants displayed in dozens of other apps, completely for free?
## OpenStreetMap map is just better
Take a look at the image above: It's [La Pirraya](https://btcmap.org/community/bitcoin-la-pirraya), a small sleepy island town in El Salvador with a circular economy being facilitated by Bitcoin Beach. Even though Blink has many more merchants compared to BTC Map, when I visited it a few months ago I could find them. Not because they do not exist, but because the map does not show any roads and it was very hard to locate them in a dense network of narrow streets of La Pirraya. BTC Map allows you to turn multiple versions of satellite maps views, making it way easier to find your point of interest. Pins also indicate what kind of business it is, where in Blink all the pins are the same and you need to click each to find out what it is. Even then not always it's clear, since Blink only displays names, while BTC Map tells you type of the merchant, and very often shows you working hours, phone numbers, website, social links, etc.
## Excellent community tools
BTC Map is focusing providing tools for communities to maintain their merchants map. [Each community has it's own page](https://btcmap.org/communities) with own links to community website or socials, displays a list of all the merchants, shows community stats, displays merchants that were not verified for a long time, and more. It even allows to "boost" merchants to make them more visible on the map and on the list. It's perfect tooling both for communities and businesses onboarding merchants to their software.
## Easy integration & configuration
Integrating BTC Map on your website or app is easy. It's just [a few lines of code of iframe](https://arc.net/l/quote/vrdudfnn) to embed the map, but you can also use [BTC Map API](https://arc.net/l/quote/sybkpvcu) for more custom integration. Do you to display, eg. you can display only merchants from your community? No problem, you can do that. Since it's all open source, you can configure it in many ways that will suit your needs.
## Kudos
I'd like to thank projects that understood all above and integrated BTC Map already. Those are Coinos, Wallet of Satoshi, Pouch, Bolt Card, BitLocal, Fedi, Decouvre Bitcoin, Osmo, Bitcoin Rocks!, Lipa, Spirit of Satoshi, Blockstream, Satlantis, Aqua Wallet and Adopting Bitcoin
## Encouragement & an offer
I'll end that with encouragement to projects that use their own maps, but haven't embraced BTC Map yet. Those are Blink, Bitcoin Jungle, Plan B, Osmo, Athena, Orange Pill App, Inbitcoin (I probably missed some, tag them!). You are doing great work, but let's join forces and paint the world orange together!
From here I would like to offer help in tagging your merchants on BTC Map. Just reach me out, and me and other supertaggers will do the work.
Let the sats flow!
originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/888088