The fact that you write that “it doesn’t really look problematic to me”, “This seems like a non-issue” and that you think that “Google” is a “political keyword” and telling another people to not use improper sources is a “pointless political fight” makes me think that you didn’t yet understood the problem. You even make sarcasm of it while keeping suggesting Google Maps as sanity check in your GitHub: “Looks good, but better to check the website and (blasphemous move) Google Maps”
To be honest I don’t trust the good faith thing much anymore.
We have a similar tool called https://www.onosm.org/
It creates notes with all the info, the same way as your GH issues, and they can be closed only after a survey by a local.
I don’t agree with you that a website is enough to add the place to the database. Most https://www.onosm.org/ notes have a website included in the info, yet we wait for a survey to add them.
If this is your approach, what you do seems more like a copy and paste in my opinion. OSM is a geographic database, and the coordinates of your GH issues are kinda problematic sometimes. A website can maybe confirm the existence of a place, but what about coordinates? Yesterday I took a look at the POIs added from the GH issues. I found restaurants in the middle of the road, butchers in the middle of nowhere in some grass area, a campsite node added 20 meters far from the same campsite already mapped as an area ecc. Aerial imagery would have been enough to understand there was no business there, yet they blindly copy-pasted coordinates because a website confirmed it presence.
If I was DWG I would keep an eye from now on people adding hundred of Bitcoin POIs all around the world in a short span of time.
Hi, I’m Kaartjesman. I’ve been working with various long time taggers of crypto. Most of those were Bitcoin Cash taggers as that is the chain which is actively aiming for in-shop presence and thus there is a real link with OSM. I’ve written the Cryptocurrency Wiki page based on those discussions. This was all before Nathan and Igor got involved with OSM.
To be blunt, I’m really surprised by the massive number of new nodes stating that those places accept currency:XBT, my experience is that for real usage its simply too expensive and vendors tend to get tricked into trying it and then after some time stop. Bitcoin (BTC) is simply not made for that.
Fun fact, just this week there was a very notable (and trusted) Bitcoin person that tweeted about the most used Lightning wallet not actually using the Lightning Network. Undermining yet another point where people actually visiting those stores would know. Fact is, they would not.
So, I do agree with the various respected openstreetmap people on this thread, that those edits and choice of tags are against most guidelines and I suspect that OpenStreetmap is used to produce fake numbers, for support of their failing narrative.
we have in my country a payment terminal company which has had a lot of Bitcoin vendors. Their website still shows most of them, even though the majority stopped accepting it over the years.
Point is, you have to go to the actual location to find the right info. Adding such location Just because some logo on a website is not following the OSM guidelines.
@kaartjesman - Let’s not decend into a CrYptO culture war here. Whether you see Bitcoin (and particularly Lightning) as valuable or not is irrelevant for this discussion. Merchants are using the Lightning network globally as a real-time payment network.
I think it is important to clarify that we are not scraping data from Google. The data we want isn’t even on Google. In no way is Google the “real source of our data”.
We are asking people to submit merchants that they know accept Bitcoin (or, just as importantly, no longer accept it) and we are then asking our community to verify that information. Some people have used Google to help with the verification of some information for some places. Let’s not blindly extrapolate; this is not fair to our community members who are taking ownership of a crappy dataset and putting in real effort to improve it. Yes there will be mistakes, but we are materially improving the quality of the data. We now have 51 communities from around the world helping out with local verification.
That said, we clearly need to improve our verification guidance and we are always open to constructive feedback from the wider OSM community.
We will take the following measures based on your feedback:
Improve our verification guidance.
Instruct our taggers to discard any submissions mentioning Google Maps as a verification source. Those submissions are tiny fraction of the total submissions.
Find all submissions mentioning Google Maps and re-verify the information using different sources.
If you think there are additional measures we should be taking then please let me know and we will consider them. Please try to stay constructive and focussed.
Re the point on ‘Nodes not ways’. We copied this guidance from the Crytocurrency page on the assumption that this was the consensus. This is clearly not the case and so we will remove this from our guidance immediately.
@ivanbranco - Thanks for the QA. Are you able to provide the node IDs so that we can improve these locations? I think a remember adding the butchers on myself. It is a farm that sells direct to the public. The owner of the farm provided the coordinates. I will double check these with the owner.
Please also read and follow Import/Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki before pasting entire database into OSM again (either in one edit or split into multiple edits).
Also, objects with no presence on the ground (online-only shop without any place that can be visited by customers) are not mappable in OSM. If it has an office used by employees it is mappable, but not with payment tags.
Yep, there were clearly mistakes with the Galoy load, which we are now working with them on to rectify. Anything without a POI type is largely useless and should be dismissed.
We are aware of the on-the-ground presence. Indeed, we are weeding these out as we verify. 59 rejected so far.
I bring up experience that most of us share (adoption tends to be short term), experiences that can be verified on the ground. Your reply tried to undermine this by bring up heavy words like “culture war”.
Your statement on what merchants are actually using is then just falling from the sky again.
A couple of months ago there was a 3000 people conference in Amsterdam, specifically for Bitcoin (BTC). The organizers stated afterwards, with pride, that they registered 2000 Bitcoin transactions during the 2 day event. For things like coffee etc.
Let that sink in; less than one transaction per person made for a 2 day conference for your coffee, for your snacks or anything else.
This has nothing to do with “culture war”. This is relevant information that highlights that the OSM data can’t possibly be correct. It is off by an order of magnitude from reality.
It is not “culture war” to point out that the mapping here has the nice side effect of creating numbers which could be used to counter such common knowledge of lack-of-adoption. I personally don’t think its fair for all the people that can actually claim to be openstreetmap supporters to be used like this.
It would be good enough if the trust wasn’t already lost. It would be good enough if we had not noticed that a large percentage of merchants are obviously invalid. Would we be checking in real life, how many more would be invalid?
These questions you pose now just invite people to lie better. I see no reason to believe they will cause those mappers to become honest. What makes you think they would become honest?
The fact is that the mappers are shown to lie, they know they should not get it from Google, or from duckduckgo so they lie by omitting the fact that they did from the comments.
The fact is that there is very strong indication that those mappers are NOT mapping according to the principles of OSM: checking on the ground. In fact, that is the main conclusion any mapper will quickly come to if they look at the entire XBT dataset.
Do you dispute those facts?
These are not new worries; you were told about these worries already in an earlier thread, but it only got worse since then. You are still not acknowledging that people HAVE TO CHECK ON THE GROUND before they map.
This user edits with a polish locale. Ok, not sure where they live… Ah, here is a changeset ( 128476776) with the comment “update survey date”. So, they were on the ground in… Edinburgh,
Ok, then we see just a couple of days later changeset 128436301. In Milano. Adding lots of new XBT accepting places, all with survey date of that changeset. Ok, our Polish guy gets around…
Here is another one; changeset 128476751, a day before the Milano one. Adding another bitcoin accepting place, also saying they served it in person. But now in a small town in Znojmo, Czechia.
I stopped looking at that point.
Now, I’m not saying the person is lying, its not entirely impossible for someone to travel that much. But its not very likely.
It looks like people are incentivized by your map to create data that supports it. Against the actual quality and guidelines that make openstreetmap a good database, one where people can trust the data to be true and verified.
I was laughing because the comment was funny. Obviously that is not our strategy. We’ve already talked about the need for better verification and so I won’t rehash that.
The shame comment is related to community ownership. As we onboard communities we want them to be proud of their areas in terms of data quality and bitcoin adoption. And yes, shameful if ‘their’ data is poor quality.
@nathan_day there seems to be a difference in culture.
If you look at the OSM wiki, you’ll find quite a lot of (implicit or otherwise) statements towards people mapping only what they can observe with their own two eyes, on the ground. From topics like Verifiability - OpenStreetMap Wiki, and look at the values-table in Key:source - OpenStreetMap Wiki. But also several policy documents linked to earlier in this thread.
Similarly, if you run “Streetcomplete” it is nagging you if you try to tag something where you can’t actually see it based on your physical location.
It follows the old tagline of OSM. “You create a better map of your neighbourhood, I create a better one for mine, we both have a better map”.
What I’m trying to explain here is a culture. A way of doing things which is as old as openstreetmap itself.
And what I see from your group is that there is a very strong disconnect. They do not share the OSM culture. At all. Notice the lack of leaderboards in OSM. There is no competition on numbers here.
Reading this thread I don’t get the impression you take our culture seriously. You stating you realize that people should not get data from Google is nice, but not even half-way to accepting our culture.
I would strongly advice you to consider doing what various other crypto groups are already doing: make your own database that overlays the map, with point of interests that are for you. Then you don’t need to worry about those pesky “OSM Purists” you laugh about on discord.
Examples; (made not-clickable since I moved to this forums only today and I deal with restrictions).
map.usecash dot com
map.bitcoin dot com
There’s zero way people can know if a merchant uses Lighting when they are doing multiple edits in different countries time. Especially if Google is being used as their main source of information. The licensing issues aside, that kind of information just isn’t available on Google Maps. Hell, it’s not even on most merchants websites. So yes, there is “zero way” editors can know if a merchant is using Lighting or not. At as far as this discussion is concerned. It’s pretty obvious the tags are just being added as a boilerplate by default regardless of what the actual merchants use.
Personally, I’d say that’s a huge grey area legally where it would probably be fine to do once in a while, but doing it in a systematic manner to create a map could probably be a legal issue if Google felt like turning it into one. Since your still technically using them as a source to build a map. Although going by the evidence I find the claim that the goal is not to copy data rather dubious. For all intents and purposes that seems to be what your users are doing. You should really make it extremely clear in your policy that people can’t use Google to verify things.
@Mateusz_Konieczny was number five on the leaderboards yesterday and now he isn’t. So something’s clearly been changed about how you tabulate the leaders. Either that, or you banned from the list. He didn’t just disappear from it on his own though.
Jesus Christ, the irony. I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in awhile
I don’t really get how it was a small dataset when @Mateusz_Konieczny was number 5 on the leaderboards from deleting what I assume is only a small percentage of the mistakes that your users have added to the map. Considering that and this discussion, the “problems” seem more like a feature of how you do things then they do a bug caused by a few bad mappers or whatever
