I’m not a big fan of mapping, but some things just need to be done. Once we attract more local editors, I’ll be able to focus on a more technical stuff, but data quality is the main bottleneck at the moment.
Key Metrics
We added 102 verified merchants, which is two times more than we added during the last week.
The total number of merchants dropped by 64, mostly due to my re-verification of extremely outdated merchants. It certainly boosted our signal-to-noise ratio.
The average number of days since the last verification dropped from 354 to 315, which is a very significant improvement. In the long run, this metric will become our key data health indicator, but we need to deal with the remaining outliers first.
Extreme Outliers
We still have some ancient places, and it’s our biggest problem. The date of the oldest verification was April 2015 in the end of last week, and now it’s December 2017.
Outdated Merchants
It’s a really nice feature introduced by secondl1ght:
https://btcmap.org/map?outdated
Opening this link allows you to see all the outdated merchants around you. It’s very handy for anyone who wants to verify their local merchants. We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people to take ownership of their local data.
In Progress: Background Sync
Every time you open BTC Map, it needs to download all the changes since your last visit. The overall sync performance depends on how long you were absent, and the quality of your Internet connection. That’s not really a big deal, but it doesn’t allow us to interact with the users asynchronously. Let’s say someone added a new bar in my area, but I won’t know about that until I open BTC Map again. Having a background sync would make sure that I will be able to see all the new places immediately after opening the app, but it also clears the patch to asynchronous notifications.
In Progress: Local Activity Notifications
We’ll start with notifying the users of any new bitcoin-accepting merchants nearby, but it’s just the beginning. We want to decentralize map editing, which means that the locals should be in charge of their data. For instance, we can create an opt-in notification channel which will notify local maintainers of any new issues with their data. It would also allow them to remove all the spam and scam promptly.
We can also make boosts more appealing by notifying the users of newly boosted places. Boosts aren’t really a significant source of money for BTC Map, but they also act as a proof that a merchant is serious about accepting bitcoins and that it has a functional Lightning wallet.