Table of Contents
Merchant Comments
I extracted about 900 valuable comments from our verification reports and I exposed them via BTC Map sync API. Comments turned out to be extremely valuable since they often add important context to certain Bitcoin merchants. The next steps are client app support and automating new comments.
Feed Reader Support
Some people are only interested in new places or comments in their areas, so they don’t want to install our apps and check them all the time. BTC Map data is open, and we never intended to lock users in, that’s why I created a few experimental Atom data feeds. Let’s say you want to get notified of new places and comments in the Netherlands, so now you can just add the following feeds to your feed reader of choice:
https://api.btcmap.org/feeds/new-places/nl
https://api.btcmap.org/feeds/new-comments/nl
Of course, you can mix and match any number of BTC Map areas, communities and countries alike. Web feed links are always available on our website, in area activity section.
RPC Interface
Most of our administrative tasks are now centralized, which means that processing new change requests might take a long time, depending on how busy we are. This model can’t scale, that’s why we’re building an admin API, alongside GUI and CLI tools which can be used to simplify access to many local administrative tasks. There is no ETA on that, but I think we’ll be able to delegate most tasks to local community managers pretty soon.
Trending Countries
- Netherlands - 190 events and comments
- Italy - 173 events and comments
- Germany - 169 events and comments
- Spain - 101 events and comments
- Portugal - 98 events and comments
- El Salvador - 95 events and comments
- United Kingdom - 83 events and comments
- Brazil - 78 events and comments
- Switzerland - 77 events and comments
- Czechia - 74 events and comments
Many merchants in the Netherlands were re-verified by Comino, which shows that a single maintainer can keep the whole country up to date. Having a single maintainer per country would allow us to keep the whole world up to date, so if your country has some old and outdated merchants, we need your help!
Italian re-verification effort can mostly be attributed to mpbin. This user not only re-verified many existing places but also added some missing general tags such as contact details and so on. Those tags are extremely valuable, so even if your area is up-to-date, you might want to check if you have enough contact details for every merchant. This account apparently belongs to Bitcoin Italia Network, and it looks like they’re taking ownership over the whole region.
Germany’s data was enhanced by many different accounts, but 65% of German locations are still outdated, so this country needs more love from local editors. Spain continues to be in a good shape, thanks to descubrebitcoin efforts, and Portugal data quality continues to improve, thanks to Sxajne.
Big thanks to Rockedf for contributing to almost every region!
Trending Communities
- Satoshi Spritz - 176 events and comments
- Einundzwanzig Deutschlan - 169 events and comments
- Einundzwanzig Portugal - 98 events and comments
- Einundzwanzig Schweiz - 78 events and comments
- Bitcoin Association Switzerland - 77 events and comments
- Dezentralschweiz - 77 events and comments
- Bitcoin Berlin - El Salvador - 60 events and comments
- Free Madeira - 51 events and comments
- Berlin 2140 - 48 events and comments
- Einundzwanzig Berlin - 48 events and comments
Global Metrics
The number of verified merchants has dropped from 6,867 to 6,734 (-2%), which means that we’re struggling to keep more than 5-7 thousands of places up-to-date, and we need more contributors who can re-verify outdated merchants.
The total number of merchants has increased from 11,685 to 11,833 (+1.3%), which is in line with our long-term trend. The stream of new merchants has no signs of tapering, we’re just struggling to maintain the old ones in certain regions.
The average number of days since the last verification has increased from 323 to 340 (+5.3%), which means that our data is now significantly less reliable than it was a month ago. This is yet another confirmation that our main bottleneck is the lack of local maintainers.
Conclusion
Our main issue is growing number of outdated locations, and getting more maintainers can take some time. It’s not the only way to improve BTC Map though, so we can focus on highlighting the best quality merchants, which I’m intending to be busy with during October. I have a few ideas on using different quality signals, and it might make sense to simply mark or hide outdated or unreliable merchants.
The best way to help us is to re-verify some outdated locations in your area, if you have any: