How to get it
Five ways to get it
Buy on an exchange
The standard route. Verification applies, fees are the lowest available, and the coins arrive in an account you can withdraw from to your own wallet.
Buy inside a wallet
Faster and more expensive. The spread is folded into the rate rather than shown, so compare against the market price before confirming.
Peer-to-peer
Buy directly from another person, with the platform holding the coins in escrow. Useful where exchanges have no banking access. The risks sit on the fiat side and are covered in the entry on P2P.
Accept it as payment
For a business, this is acquisition and revenue at the same time. A payment gateway handles receipt, and the full setup appears in the guide to accepting crypto payments.
Mine it
Realistically closed to individuals. Industrial operations with cheap electricity and purpose-built hardware set the difficulty, and competing from a home computer stopped being viable more than a decade ago.
Where to spend it
Where it can actually be spent
The honest summary: through payment gateways almost anywhere, directly at a smaller number of places than lists suggest.
Direct acceptance by large retailers has come and gone repeatedly. Companies announce it, quietly remove it, and sometimes return. Any list of names is stale within months, which is why the reliable answer is structural rather than a list.
Through a gateway
Any merchant using a crypto payment provider accepts it, and this is the large majority of real acceptance. The merchant may not describe itself as a Bitcoin business at all.
Categories where it concentrates
Hosting and VPN services, digital goods, iGaming, online services aimed at international customers. These share a trait: cross-border customers and friction with card processing.
Gift cards
An indirect route that works broadly. Buy a card with Bitcoin, spend the card anywhere.
In person
Rare and shrinking. The fee and confirmation time suit a coffee purchase poorly, which is what Lightning and other layer 2 networks exist to fix.
Why spending is less common than holding
Two reasons, and both are structural rather than a matter of adoption.
Spending a volatile asset means realising a position, and in many jurisdictions creating a taxable event. Holders behave accordingly.
And stablecoins do the payment job better. They carry roughly 82 percent of the volume passing through crypto payment gateways as of 2026 according to CoinLaw, because a payer sending a dollar and a merchant receiving a dollar both prefer the amount to stay a dollar.