Cryptocurrency

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Wikipedia defines CryptoCurrency with: A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.

Crypto currencies are so called "peer to peer" money and some merchants are accepting it as payment, often in parallel to local currencies. This page is meant as a guideline on how people around the world tag on OSM the acceptance of cryptocurrencies.

Tag using currency:*=*

Crypto currencies, as the name implies, are currencies. They provide an alternative to the Euro, Dollar or Ruble. The merchant would need to exchange it in order to pay another merchant that doesn't take this currency. As such it is easy to see that we should be using Currency:* as a base.

In the past tagging has happened using payment=* instead. The Payment tag is about payment methods, for instance it allows declaring that a place refuses cash, or that it specifically accepts a cheque. Crypto currencies provide their own payment methods, for instance the reading of a QR code on some screen of the merchant. Crypto currencies are in some ways both a currency and a payment method, and this is likely the reason for the confusion in the past. But crypto is first a currency, and as such currency=* is what we should prefer using for tagging.

A 2021 proposal for cryptocurrencies with payment tags was strongly rejected by the OSM community in a vote with many claiming that their tag style was not OSM-style, but also in part due to the vote being brigaded.

Physical payment

Based on the principles of the openstreetmap practices, we only tag locations that accept the cryptocurrency at the physical location itself.

In some counties delivery companies have started accepting crypto for a large number of restaurants, but only when you order via them and online. Tagging those restaurants as accepting crypto is not good practice as this creates a false expectation. Openstreetmap values Verifiability and not being able to pay at the location with cryptocurrencies fails that.

Tag points, not ways

In openstreetmap you have a lot of flexibility, a building can be tagged with an address and a shop and a building all at once. But in most parts of the world this is now frowned upon and we have moved to separate those. A building is tagged as a such, and a separate point is added for the store or restaurant that is there.

What this means in practice is that we advice using the currency=* on a point, combined with the merchant information which accepts it. Various online resources will simply skip ways / buildings and as such your tagging efforts will only be seen when you tag the point.

Examples

The absence of a tag is the same as no, as such in almost all cases you will want to provide value yes.

currency:XBT=yes

currency:BCH=yes

currency:LTC=yes

currency:XMR=yes

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