Nice it surely would be, as would be having so many more details in OSM. That is not in question, I don’t think. The problem is the burden of keeping it correct/up-to-date. If there aren’t enough mappers/open data producers to keep other more ordinary details (e.g. opening hours, and even PoI addresses, which rarely change) up-to-date, why would discount values be different? Especially considering the user-base is smaller (any OSM user vs OSM∩cryptocurrency users).
I think the tag keys should be grouped like
payment:XBT:lightning=*,
payment:XBT:lightning_nfc=*,
payment:XBTClassic:lightning=*,
payment:Ethereum:contractX=*
Because this space is exploding with new tech, so lightning is hardly the last tech we are going to use for payment, and Bitcoin is hardly the last crypto we will use. And other cryptos might have lightning as well.
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I agree that those things are dynamic, that’s why I’m not a fan of payment namespace. Historically, people agreed on currency:XBT and it’s currently a de-facto standard, although people are still divided on whether Bitcoin is a currency or a payment method. Most mappers who contribute to Bitcoin dataset tag it as a currency, but this currency can be transferred via different protocols which can be mapped as payment methods, here is a few examples:
- onchain (payment:onchain)
- lightning (payment:lightning)
- nfc (payment:lightning_contactless)
I’m not a fan of the current arrangement for the following reasons:
- As you mentioned, some payment protocols can be used outside of Bitcoin, namespace squatting is bad.
- Payment methods aren’t really important since most wallets support them all and users might not even know which payment methods are available to them. If they need to be aware of those deeply technical things, they need to find better wallets, it’s out of OSM scope.
- It’s not realistic to expect the staff to be aware of those deeply tecnical details, which breaks the verifiability rule.
- Payment methods are dynamic which means that those tags are unreliable.
- Extra tags make it harder to onboard new mappers, it adds mental and maintenance burden for little to no benefit.
In my view, we shouldn’t encourage people to tag payment methods at all, it puts the quality and sustainability of this dataset at risk. A single tag is enough and can be either left unchanged (currency:XBT) or changed to something more popular, if people like it more (payment:XBT, currency:BTC, payment:BTC or whatever).
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The rationale for having the discounts mapped is that really makes the differences for a lot of bitcoiners, they really have troubles spending bitcoin if not discount is present. There are really few venues with that and mostly kept by payment service providers or community enthusiasts. The tags are already supported by apps like “quibitcoin.it”.
This in particular, generally speaking I fully agree with you.