[Tagging] Bitcoin ATM (amenity=atm | currency:XBT=yes)

Serge Wroclawski emacsen at gmail.com
Tue Jun 10 10:35:26 UTC 2014


On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 5:36 AM, Janko Mihelić <janjko at gmail.com> wrote:

> What if it gave you paper money for Bitcoins? Would it be an ATM then? What
> if there's a shop that only works with bitcoins? Is it a shop?
>
> An ATM isn't a machine that gives you paper money, the term is broader than
> that.

These semantic arguments are going to underly my broader point, later
on in this email.

> I don't get how tagging something correctly is advertising.
>
> I'm not that stubborn, if people are against tagging Bitcoin ATMs as
> amenity=atm I'm fine with that. An alternative could be amenity=bitcoin_atm.
> Maybe there should be a vote.

The core issue is two part:

1. The community process for tagging is one based on the understanding
of regular person. Using dictionary definitions or quoting wikipedia
is exactly why this is it's getting so much pushback. If you want to
make some definition for a new type of machine that is a bitcoin
machine- go ahead. Here's a suggestion for one:

amenity=cryptocurrency_kiosk
currencies=bitcoin;litecoin

And your tagging problem is solved.

2. The bitcoin community has generally been skirting the rules

Bitcoin mappers have been doing everything from copying other maps
outright (violating copyright), to geocoding against Google and then
placing that in OSM (violating copyright) to geocoding against
nominatim and then using that (really bad quality data).

A while back, when I would see suspicious Bitcoin data, I would try to
contact the mapper and if it it was confirmed that it was bad- delete
the data. Sometimes the users told me they didn't know anything about
OSM, or OSM rules about what should or should not be on the map. Other
were outright rude to me about it- saying that I was part of the
banking conspiracy, etc.

It's my experience, and the experience of many others, that the
Bitcoin community overall (not everyone, but as a group) has been
really uninterested in OSM as a whole, and has been just dumping
things into the database in a way that is not only bad data, but is
potentially dangerous for OSM (if there are copyright violations).

I have a side project (which is currently on the back burner) which is
able to show which Bitcoin data is highly suspicious of this kind of
either copying or geocoding. I haven't deployed it yet, but I think
if/when I do, it would show a very large percentage of Bitcoin data is
either of low data quality or is copied or geocoded from another
source. My conclusion (without having run the data) is based on
limited data I've looked at, and Bitcoin mappers I've spoken with.

I would like to see Bitcoin mappers to start collecting data like the
rest of us- by hand and direct observation, then I think Bitcoin
proposals would be less contentious.

- Serge



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