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1. 278 Washington Businesses Now Take Bitcoin
A survey of Washington state published on November 10, 2026 counts 278 businesses that accept Bitcoin (BTC) as payment, spread across 94 named cities, with Seattle accounting for 46 of them. The list includes Snorkel, a Seattle manufacturer that has built a bitcoin hot tub: a cedar tub whose water is warmed by two mining machines.
The tally is drawn from BTC Map, a community-maintained directory of merchants that take the cryptocurrency. Because volunteers keep the map up to date, the count reflects what users have recorded rather than an official registry, and businesses can ask for their entries to be added or corrected.
What emerges is a picture of ordinary commerce more than of specialist crypto firms. The listings are dominated by coffee shops, restaurants, salons, repair shops and professional services, the kinds of businesses that people visit in the course of a normal week. A manufacturer with a history going back to the 1970s sits in the same directory as a Renton gift shop and a walk-up espresso counter on Seattle's Capitol Hill.
2. Snorkel: A Cedar Tub Maker Since 1979
Snorkel has been making hot tubs in the Pacific Northwest since 1979, and its wood-stove business dates to the late 1970s. The company is known for tubs built entirely of cedar and for the heating method that gives it its name.
In the traditional design, a wood-burning stove sits submerged in the tub itself. The stove's air intake and exhaust rise above the waterline like a snorkel, allowing the fire to burn below the surface while the surrounding water absorbs the heat directly from the stove's walls. No pump or electric heating element is required.
That simplicity is the product's main selling point. A wood-fired cedar tub can be installed in places with no electrical hookup at all, such as a cabin, a remote property or a garden far from the house. For decades the company's identity rested on heating water without a connection to the grid, which makes its recent turn toward bitcoin mining hardware, equipment that runs entirely on electricity, a notable change of direction.
3. A Wager Between Brothers Led to Bitcoin Payments
Snorkel's involvement with the cryptocurrency began in 2025 with a bet. The company's owner started accepting bitcoin for hot tubs after a wager with his brother.
Sales in bitcoin did not arrive quickly. Early payments were slow, and the decision to accept the currency did not immediately change the business. What it did bring was a new group of prospective customers with a specific request.
Bitcoin users who came across the company kept asking for the same thing: a hot tub powered by a bitcoin miner. The idea follows from a basic property of mining hardware. The machines consume substantial amounts of electricity, and nearly all of that energy leaves the device as heat. In a typical mining facility, that heat is a problem to be removed. For a business whose entire product is warm water, it is a resource.
The owner responded by building one. Snorkel developed a version of its tub paired with mining machines that warm the water, working on the build with a company called Hashrate House.
4. How Does a Bitcoin Hot Tub Work?
A bitcoin hot tub uses the waste heat from mining machines to warm the water, in place of a wood stove or a conventional electric heater. The electricity the miners draw is converted to heat as they run, and that heat is transferred to the tub.
Snorkel's prototype uses two S19J Pro miners drawing about 8 kilowatts between them. The setup reportedly took a tub from cold to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius, in under four hours. That temperature is the standard upper setting for hot tub use, so the figure describes a full heating cycle rather than a partial warm-up.
The comparison with a normal electric tub is what makes the concept economically interesting. An electric resistance heater turns electricity into heat and produces nothing else. A mining machine also turns electricity into heat, but it performs bitcoin mining work while doing so, and that work can earn income. In both cases the owner pays for the electricity and ends up with hot water. In the second case the owner may also end up with bitcoin.
Bitcoin mining is the process by which specialized computers compete to add new blocks of transactions to the Bitcoin network, earning newly issued coins and transaction fees when they succeed. The machines are designed for calculation rather than for heating, but the two outputs are inseparable: every watt consumed in the calculation is released as warmth.
5. An Award in Denver and a Prediction for the Industry
The miner-heated tub has already drawn recognition among people working on heat reuse. The project won an innovation award at the Heat Punk Summit in Denver, a gathering focused on putting mining heat to practical use, and a Snorkel tub is on display there.
Snorkel's owner has drawn a broad conclusion from the project. He predicts that every electric hot tub will eventually be heated by miners. The reasoning is that mining income offsets the cost of energy that would otherwise be lost as heat, so a tub heated this way recovers part of its running cost in a way a conventional heater cannot.
The prediction is the owner's view rather than an established trend, and it applies specifically to tubs that already rely on electricity. Snorkel's wood-fired models, which need no electrical connection, serve a different use. The miner-heated version extends the company's range toward customers who have power available and an interest in mining, rather than replacing the product on which the business was built.
6. Two Coffee Shops on the List
Coffee is among the largest categories in the Washington directory, and two of the listed shops show how small the typical bitcoin-accepting business is. Neither is a crypto company; both are neighborhood cafes that added bitcoin as one more way to pay.
The Rose Gift House and Coffee is located at 226 Main Ave S in downtown Renton, in the Old Renton Pub building. Owner Katie Newman opened it in October 2020 as a gift shop that also served coffee, and over time coffee became the larger part of the business. The shop stocks locally roasted coffee, artisan goods and grab-and-go food, and it won Best Customer Service in the 2025 Best of Renton readers' poll.
Overcast Coffee operates on Seattle's Capitol Hill. Owner Jonathan Pak opened the first shop in June 2020 as a walk-up counter at 312 15th Ave E, beside Kaiser Permanente. A second location at 1517 12th Ave sits inside the Metier bike complex. The company buys its coffee and ingredients from small, local Seattle businesses.
Both shops opened in 2020 and both built their trade around local suppliers. Their presence on the list reflects a pattern visible across the directory: bitcoin acceptance in Washington is concentrated among independent, locally owned businesses rather than national chains.
7. Where Bitcoin Is Accepted, Category by Category
The 278 listings are grouped into nine categories. The largest is health, services and professional businesses, with 50 entries, followed by beauty and wellness with 46, restaurants and fast food with 44, and coffee, bakery and sweets with 42.
Retail, shopping and entertainment accounts for 31 businesses, and auto and transport for 22. Groceries and food shops number 12, while bars, breweries and wine make up 11. A further 20 entries fall into a miscellaneous category.
The individual entries give a sense of the range. The coffee and sweets group includes Toasted. Bagels & Coffee and Fortunato Chocolate; the restaurant group includes Ooink Ramen, Poke Fresh and Papa Zuzu's Pizza. Jones Creek Brewery and Headworks Brewing appear among the bars and breweries, Northwest Butchery among the food shops, Rapid Towing under auto and transport, and GameBound Video Games and Fern Plant Shop under retail. Snorkel itself is filed under beauty and wellness, with a Seattle address.
The distribution shows that food and drink, taken together, form the single biggest block. Coffee shops, restaurants, bars and grocers add up to 109 of the 278 listings, or roughly four in ten. Service businesses are close behind: the professional and beauty categories combined account for 96 entries.
Geographically, the list is broad but uneven. Seattle's 46 listings make it the leading city by a clear margin, yet they represent only about one in six of the total. The remaining businesses are distributed across 93 other named cities, which indicates that acceptance is not confined to the state's largest urban center.
8. What the Directory Does and Does Not Show
Because the figures come from a community-maintained map, they carry some limitations. Entries depend on volunteers and business owners to add and update them, so a shop that accepts bitcoin but has never been recorded would not be counted, and a listing can remain after a business changes its policy.
The count also says nothing about how often customers pay in bitcoin. Snorkel's own experience illustrates the difference between accepting the currency and receiving it: the company's early bitcoin payments were slow, and its most significant result from the decision was not a surge in sales but a new product idea brought to it by customers.
That may be the more telling detail in the survey. For a manufacturer that had sold wood-fired cedar tubs since 1979, accepting bitcoin opened a conversation with a community that had a technical problem, surplus heat, and saw in a hot tub a way to use it. The directory records where bitcoin can be spent in Washington; the Snorkel project shows one case in which taking it changed what a business makes.