Every BTC Map merchant has a last check date, which is used to figure out if the data is still reliable. Most merchants were verified less than a year ago, but we also have a small number of extreme outliers. This week, I was busy verifying the oldest places in our dataset.

The oldest verification date was April 2014, and now it’s April 2015, which is a noticeable improvement. Unfortunately, about 90% of those places were either out of business or no longer accepting bitcoins.

Here are a few interesting weekly metrics:

We added 55 more verified merchants, which is a good trend.

The total number of merchants dropped by 142, mostly due to my re-verification effort. It certainly boosted our signal-to-noise ratio.

The average number of days since the last verification dropped from 411 to 353, 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.