[ANN] BTCJam - Peer to Peer Bitcoin Lending

[Tulkas]

Does your credit rating drop if you dont make a payment Before its due?
I have a loan out, payment due today (10/18). Received an email at 8:30pm telling me my payment was late. and now my credit score has dropped from a 5 to a 4???

No, the drop reflects your current ratio of open versus repaid balance.

 About the email, i'm sorry, its a time zone issue, will be fixed on the next release.

[Tulkas]

Another suggestion to improve the usability of the site: is possible to make clearly evident in the listing that a user is not respecting payments? Maybe using a red flag or changing name color...
Only rating is not sufficient:  for example user https://btcjam.com/users/185 has a reputation of 10% but 2 overdue payments...

Any user who has late payments automatically gets a credit rating of zero, you think a tag on the listing page is necessary too?

[Tulkas]

3 of the people that have to pay a loan to me are late (payment is for yesterday 10/16): how can I/we enforce the settlement?

+1 on this, Do you get in contact or anything? How is it going with your "enforcement" plan?

Not ready yet, we have one person in the US right now taking care of this, hope we have news soon.

[ercolinux]

3 of the people that have to pay a loan to me are late (payment is for yesterday 10/16): how can I/we enforce the settlement?

+1 on this, Do you get in contact or anything? How is it going with your "enforcement" plan?

Not ready yet, we have one person in the US right now taking care of this, hope we have news soon.

The platform is really interesting both as oppurtunity for an investment and as mean to obtain some funds, but unless you can assure some better form of protection from scam it become easily unusable at all: at the moment I've 15 investment done, of which 6 had to be partially repaid at the date: only 3 investors have paid back them. A 50% of loan not repayed is really too high to sustain. And for what I can see other investors are in the same situation too

[squall1066]

I have lost too much now, so until there is some enforcement going on I am refraining to invest.

My fault too, I guess I got carried away on this good idea. 

[SaintDevil]

I love the website. I know lendingclub pretty well, and having something similar in bitcoin is a great idea.
Especially when you can request a loan at a lower rate without predetermined by the system at a high %.

Not sure how it sounds, but I thought about what if people who paid their loan got badges.
Then based on how many times they repaid they would earn certain type of badges.
Paid 10 times, got 10+ badges 50 times - 50+, etc.

[ercolinux]

I wonder if we can get maybe a private loan, so it wouldn't be public, only people with the unique url could view it and fund it, so if I had people I know that would like to loan me coins I could create a private give it to them and they could use it to fund, and maybe even have the private loan be able to setup so if the loan was for 100 coins, and I could put a limit of 25 coins per person.

I don't see the utility of private loan: if you know someone that want to lend you money just ask them to do it

[emuLOAD]

I have to add my voice to those showing doubt on the platform.

I do find the idea very good, and the execution (site-wise) well thought out and built.


But after all is said and done, this site is about exactly one thing, loans. A lender will only invest his money if there is some form of guarantee that he will make money, not lose them. I hope your US contact manages to find a good solution quickly, because the website is in its current state nothing more than a good idea that does not really work.

Many investors are loosing rather than gaining, and this is already alienating many of us, from the smaller to the larger, to simply cut our losses.

I hope the site manages to overcome this hurdle, which I appreciate is by no means an easy feat... but at the going rate of failure to repay, we would need to start demanding interest of 30, 40% minimum just to cover for our losses, let alone turn a profit... this would doubtlessly kill the platform outright.


As far as private loans go, I agree there is really no point in implementing such a feature. The great strength of BTCJam is its social nature and the transparency that can be built into it. Private loans are probably best managed... well, in private amongst all interested parties.

[Tulkas]

I have to add my voice to those showing doubt on the platform.

I do find the idea very good, and the execution (site-wise) well thought out and built.


But after all is said and done, this site is about exactly one thing, loans. A lender will only invest his money if there is some form of guarantee that he will make money, not lose them. I hope your US contact manages to find a good solution quickly, because the website is in its current state nothing more than a good idea that does not really work.

Many investors are loosing rather than gaining, and this is already alienating many of us, from the smaller to the larger, to simply cut our losses.

I hope the site manages to overcome this hurdle, which I appreciate is by no means an easy feat... but at the going rate of failure to repay, we would need to start demanding interest of 30, 40% minimum just to cover for our losses, let alone turn a profit... this would doubtlessly kill the platform outright.


As far as private loans go, I agree there is really no point in implementing such a feature. The great strength of BTCJam is its social nature and the transparency that can be built into it. Private loans are probably best managed... well, in private amongst all interested parties.

I've gathered some site statistics:

25 repaid loans
42 active loans with no late payments
16 loans with late payments

Of this 16 late loans, 9 are from 3 users.
So we have 19% late loans and 12% late users.

We don't like those numbers either, although they are much lower than the initial default rate of similar sites (proper had a 40% default rate at the beginning).

Even some very suspicious listings got funded, from users with no reputation, little verified info, unbelievable rates and multiple active loans, some with the same title!

As much as we don't want to interfere on loans and let the users build their reputation and investors invest where they want we are going to a much more strict listing policy, protect the investors is our top priority right now.

We are also implementing some nice features that will greatly help investors (group loans is one). We aim to achieve 98% repayment rate, I cant disclose all the measures now, but they will be available soon.

We are confident that the site is a great platform for loans but they are loans after all, so precautions must be taken by the investors.

[scribe]

Just to add - I love the site, the beginning is always going to be the trickiest bit as people build reputation. More people using it and more feedback weighing in will go a long way to making the experience for lenders much more approachable.

In the meantime, I'm just lending less to people with less proven history. I'll wait to see what happens on those first few defaulters, but was clearly my choice to make the loan.

[Vod]

Even some very suspicious listings got funded, from users with no reputation, little verified info, unbelievable rates and multiple active loans, some with the same title!

Probably the same user making an investor account to fund his own investment and gain trust.  Unfortunately I decided to not use this service as it is too open to abuse. 

[LiteBit]

We just found your site last week and we want to encourage you that the concept is solid and the need for this service in the Bitcoin community is obvious. Fantastic!

[michaelmclees]

Just to add - I love the site, the beginning is always going to be the trickiest bit as people build reputation. More people using it and more feedback weighing in will go a long way to making the experience for lenders much more approachable.

In the meantime, I'm just lending less to people with less proven history. I'll wait to see what happens on those first few defaulters, but was clearly my choice to make the loan.

I agree.  Although I've never used the site, I have looked around on Silk Road.  There, certain sellers have large ratings of previous transactions.  How is this possible when they can simply all take the money and run?  They want future business.  It will be the same here in time.  Various debtors will have large ratings and they will attract loans at low interest rates, as they should.  Building credit is always hard at first, whether it is with your bank or with Bitcoins.

[CharlesPonzi]

I have to add my voice to those showing doubt on the platform.

I do find the idea very good, and the execution (site-wise) well thought out and built.


But after all is said and done, this site is about exactly one thing, loans. A lender will only invest his money if there is some form of guarantee that he will make money, not lose them. I hope your US contact manages to find a good solution quickly, because the website is in its current state nothing more than a good idea that does not really work.

Many investors are loosing rather than gaining, and this is already alienating many of us, from the smaller to the larger, to simply cut our losses.

I hope the site manages to overcome this hurdle, which I appreciate is by no means an easy feat... but at the going rate of failure to repay, we would need to start demanding interest of 30, 40% minimum just to cover for our losses, let alone turn a profit... this would doubtlessly kill the platform outright.


As far as private loans go, I agree there is really no point in implementing such a feature. The great strength of BTCJam is its social nature and the transparency that can be built into it. Private loans are probably best managed... well, in private amongst all interested parties.

If it becomes successful you will get entire forums dedicated to scamming bitcoins from it.

[paraipan]

@Tulkas, you could probably mitigate the "fake investor" issue by requiring a minimum deposit from someone willing to lend.

[ercolinux]

I've gathered some site statistics:

25 repaid loans
42 active loans with no late payments
16 loans with late payments

Of this 16 late loans, 9 are from 3 users.
So we have 19% late loans and 12% late users.

Nice to hear that the total number is lower than my experience 

We don't like those numbers either, although they are much lower than the initial default rate of similar sites (proper had a 40% default rate at the beginning).

Even some very suspicious listings got funded, from users with no reputation, little verified info, unbelievable rates and multiple active loans, some with the same title!

I know that (I'm one of the guy that has financed one of the loan with no verified info - but on that I know well that is a risk). For the multiple active loan is not uncommon for a startup to ask for 2-3 small loans instead of a big one (I'm thinking on the not repaid loan of casfow for example) because is faster to start to obtain some money on  3 loans of 20BTC (asap I reach 14BTC I can start the loan) than on 1 of 60 (where I need 42BTC to start it).
Incredible rates is again not so strange (or almost is not here in Italy): I receive a flyer of a mall yesterday that promise a rate of 0% for installment payments over 10 months. Reading the small prints on a 100€ buy you'll pay near 50€ of extra costs for loan opening and so on, is it a 50% rate of interest, so make a loan here at 30% is 20% saving.

As much as we don't want to interfere on loans and let the users build their reputation and investors invest where they want we are going to a much more strict listing policy, protect the investors is our top priority right now.

We are also implementing some nice features that will greatly help investors (group loans is one). We aim to achieve 98% repayment rate, I cant disclose all the measures now, but they will be available soon.

We are confident that the site is a great platform for loans but they are loans after all, so precautions must be taken by the investors.

Nice to hear that from you.

[michaelmclees]

Even some very suspicious listings got funded, from users with no reputation, little verified info, unbelievable rates and multiple active loans, some with the same title!

Probably the same user making an investor account to fund his own investment and gain trust.  Unfortunately I decided to not use this service as it is too open to abuse. 

Yeah.  If I were a scammer... this would be the first thing I would do.

[scribe]

Even some very suspicious listings got funded, from users with no reputation, little verified info, unbelievable rates and multiple active loans, some with the same title!

Probably the same user making an investor account to fund his own investment and gain trust.  Unfortunately I decided to not use this service as it is too open to abuse. 

Yeah.  If I were a scammer... this would be the first thing I would do.

More integration with Bitcoin-OTC would be pretty neat, as I think this has ways to check against that kind of thing.

(It would also be great to be able to feed back into OTC, but not sure if this is possible.)

[Tulkas]

Thanks for the input guys!

The premisse is that users want to build a reputable profile and have access to loans at low rates.

I think we have a solution for the fake investors problem, we can make only the the repaid amount to other verified investors count as reputation, so we don't prevent non verified investors from using the site.
 

[emuLOAD]

I've gathered some site statistics:

25 repaid loans
42 active loans with no late payments
16 loans with late payments

Of this 16 late loans, 9 are from 3 users.
So we have 19% late loans and 12% late users.

[cut]

We are confident that the site is a great platform for loans but they are loans after all, so precautions must be taken by the investors.

Thanks Tulkas, this is exactly the kind of information I love to see!

In fact, the statistics on active loans/on-time and late payments is quite intriguing, and I must say paints a much less terrible situation. indeed better than I would have expected.

It would be great to have that kind of site-global stats automatically calculated and live on the site in a future release.

Thanks for your work. Hopefully those numbers do improve because on one point I wholeheartedly agree with you, you are indeed building a great platform.

PS: I do not blame the site for any losses I incur, that should be clear.