Organised Editing/Activities/BTCMap
BTC Map
Background
BTCMap.org enables bitcoiners to easily find places to spend bitcoin anywhere on the planet.
We are a not-for-profit organisation and all of our code is free and open source.
Here is our BTC Map Organised Editing Team page.
Aim
Our aims within the scope of OSM are to:
- Verify the legacy data within OSM and, where appropriate, either remove the bitcoin tags entirely or migrate to the current tags. The payment:bitcoin=* tag is defined as legacy and is a now deprecated.
- Recruit a team of new OSM users from within the wider bitcoin community to help verify locations in-person and maintain the dataset.
- Engage with the wider OSM community to help educate them on the use of bitcoin tags.
Contact
You can reach the BTCMap.org team on our Discord.
You can email BTCMap.org directly at hello@btcmap.org.
Here is the BTC Map GitHub.
Hashtag
We use the "#btcmap" hashtag.
Community Consultation
OSM Community Forum:
The BTC Map community remains open to constructive dialogue with wider OSM community.
Timeframe & Progress
This activity began in September 2022 and will be ongoing.
We inherited a large and very poor quality legacy dataset and it will take time and effort to properly clean-up and verify, whilst adding newly verified merchants as they begin accepting bitcoin.
Tools and Data Sources
We have forms on our website that enable non-OSM users to:
- Submit a merchant that accepts bitcoin.
- Submit verification information either confirming the payment information about the merchant is accurate or specifying what information is inaccurate.
These submissions create Issues in our GitHub Repo, which are then verified by our community of OSM users. We refer to our community as 'Shadowy Supertaggers' - a light-hearted joke.
The legacy data is being slowly verified by our community. The task will be be split-up on a per country basis with local taggers encouraged to take ownership of local data.
Here are our Tagging Instructions.
In addition to data sourced from our website, we also have sourced data from the following sources and have permission to enter this data into OSM:
Participants & Gamification
We have a broad range of BTC Map Communities from around the world.
Participants are able to earn BTC Map Badges and appear on the BTC Map Leaderboard. This is similar to other initiatives such as OSM Community Badges and MapRoulette.
Participants are also able to receive tips via the Lightning network.
All participation is on a voluntary basis.
Notes on Verification
We believe that locals know best, so we take the following steps to prioritize local edits:
- Assigning country tags to web form submissions.
- Verifying new communities and building tools to track the quality of community maintenance.
- Encouraging users to report their on-site purchases and share any visual evidence.
Given the poor state of the legacy data set, we believe that even remote edits based on publicly available online data and/or phone/email survey lead to substantial quality improvement, especially if we're talking about places which weren't maintained for many years. Our goal is to minimize the amount of remote edits as we onboard more communities and create more tools to help the existing communities to maintain local data-sets.
Results
| Tag | Tag Info | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| payment:bitcoin=* | This number should tend towards zero. NGD. | |
| currency:XBT=* | This number should rise to match the number of actual bitcoin merchants. NGU. | |
| payment:onchain=* | This number should rise to match the number of actual bitcoin merchants using on-chain payments. NGU. | |
| payment:lightning=* | This number should rise to match the number of actual bitcoin merchants using Lightning . NGU. | |
| payment:lightning_contactless=* | This number should rise to match the number of actual bitcoin merchants using Lightning contactless. NGU. |