How the atlas works.

What counts as a Bitcoin place

A named place or programme that tries to make Bitcoin part of everyday life in a real location — a town’s circular economy, an island initiative, a city programme, a district, or a programme that runs across several places. Every record rests on a first-party page — the operator’s or programme’s own. Directories help us find places but are never the source; a place we can trace only through a directory, or whose own page would not open at the last check, stays in the register as Unverified rather than being dropped or guessed at.

How a status is graded

A year-only date counts only when the whole of that year, up to our check, sits inside the twelve-month window: checked in September 2026, “2026” counts and “2025” does not. A page that fails to load is a reason to look again, never a closure.

How sure we are is a separate note on every record: our confidence that we read the source correctly — that the operator really displays this figure, on this page, undated or dated as stated. It is not a rating of whether the operator’s claim is true; adoption figures are self-reported.

Where the facts come from

Every record rests on one first-party page — the operator’s or programme’s own — with the place on that page where the facts sit and the day we checked it. Facts are paraphrased; adoption figures are reported exactly as the operator gives them and are never audited by us. When a source gives no date for its figures, the record says so instead of guessing.

What the atlas does not do

• No merchant pins. Street-level merchant data belongs to BTC Map and OpenStreetMap; we use none of it.
• No rankings, ratings or recommendations. A status says what a place publishes, not whether it is good, safe or worth a visit.
• No financial content. Nothing here is an offer, an endorsement or a recommendation to buy Bitcoin or to travel.
• No personal data. Organisations, not people.

The map

Places are drawn at their locality — town, district or island — using coordinates from Wikidata (CC0). National programmes sit at their country’s centre and say so. Multi-country programmes are listed but not mapped. The base map is Natural Earth (public domain). Billasaari, the dashed ring off Helsinki, is the island that doesn’t exist yet — the story this atlas grew out of.

Versions and the monthly record

The register is versioned. On the first day of every month a snapshot of every place’s grade is frozen, appended to a hash-chained history and never recomputed; from November 2026 the snapshot also records whether each source page answered. Sources are re-checked on a rolling basis, at least every 120 days, so a grade can change between snapshots and shows up in the next one.

• v0.2.01 October 2026First public candidate. 26 places checked at their operators' own pages between 2026-09-09 and 2026-09-30; status grades and Wikidata localities added; first monthly snapshot (2026-10) frozen.

The data

Version 0.2.0 · 26 places · checked 9–30 September 2026.

• places.csvEvery record, one row each
• places.jsonThe same records with metadata
• status-history.csvMonthly statuses, hash-chained
• datapackage.jsonFrictionless Data Package: schema, licence, version

Data dictionary · 28 fields

id	Permanent record identifier, lower-case, never reassigned.
name	The place or programme’s current public name.
scope	The geography the operator claims, in their terms. Not a merchant-coverage claim.
locality	The town, district, island or country the record is mapped to.
country_iso2	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code; empty for multi-country programmes.
country	Country name.
region	Atlas region.
kind	circular-economy · island-initiative · city-programme · district · programme-network.
status	active · quiet · ceased · unverified — the rules are on this page.
last_dated_activity	The most recent dated activity found (YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD); empty when none was found.
grade_basis	One sentence on why the record has its status.
summary	What the place does and for whom, paraphrased from the operator.
operator	The organisation that runs it. No personal contact data.
funding	How it is funded, as far as the operator discloses.
adoption	Adoption figures exactly as the operator reports them; never audited by us.
evidence_limit	What those figures do not show.
evidence_grade	How sure we are that we read the source correctly, with its limits — not a rating of whether the claim is true.
fact_as_of	The date the source gives for its facts, or “unknown” when the source is undated. Never inferred from the access date.
evidence_url	The operator’s or programme’s own page the record rests on.
source_locator	Where on that page the facts sit (heading or label).
accessed_date	The day we last checked the source.
activity_url	A second first-party page, when the dated activity sits elsewhere.
wikidata_qid	Wikidata item for the locality (CC0).
lat	Latitude of the locality, from Wikidata P625 (CC0). Not an address.
lon	Longitude of the locality, from Wikidata P625 (CC0).
coord_level	locality · country · none.
graded_on	The day the status grade was last assigned.
record_url	This record’s page in the atlas.

Licence and citation

The register — our identifiers, taxonomy, status grades and paraphrased facts — is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Use it for anything, with attribution:

Billasaari Bitcoin Places Register, v0.2.0 (2026). billasaari.com/atlas. CC BY 4.0.

Each record’s source page belongs to its operator; follow the link for their own terms.