BTCjam - Any Thoughts or Experiances

[ReliableGar]

I've been on BTCJam for a few months now and both invested and borrowed heavily.  I've been scammed by 3 users which I put down to my own lack of caution.  Could more be done to help new users navigate the site and be given tips to spot scammers?  Sure!  But that's not a fault of BTCJam - it's just a lack of a feature they could have.  I currently administer a facebook group for users of BTCJam, we're almost 300 members strong - I won't post a link because I just signed up today and think that would be frowned upon. In that group we discuss tips and our experiences with various users.  Since connecting with some of the other strong members of the community I am confident investing.  Two amazing sites have spawned from the group for helping investors - one scrapes data from BTCJam and compiles awesome charts and figures on each user, and the other is a full-fledged community site (launching soon).

Let's not forget the philosophy that makes Bitcoin awesome - no central, top-down authority.  This is community - for BTCJam to become stricter on borrowers would also be to become more authoritarian.  Not that there should be no rules - but Bitcoin and BTCJam is so new that us early adopters are the ones who bare the effects of the teething pains and make this industry/community safe for all of our friends and family to join us here in the future.  I'm happy to pay the costs and put in the work to make it safe - I'm not going to pass the buck to others.

For all of it's teething pains - BTCjam is one of the most important developments in recent history.  Access to capital at any time without pleading to the banksters is too important - I'm thinking mostly of it's use to the third world where startups can acquire funding by sitting down with their phone for 20 minutes. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here!

[DJBenson]

Thought I'd post my own BTCJam experiences here - hopefully a balanced view of what BTCJam has meant for me.

I registered back in January 2014 after getting sick of the banks in the UK giving close to nothing by way of interest on my savings. As with every diversified investment portfolio, I didn't dump all my savings into Bitcoin, but I do have what I consider a sizeable chunk of cash invested now (10 BTC at the present time).

In the early days I had relative success, but Bitcoin being so far detached from real currency, I paid little attention to the amount I was investing in one borrower, this was fine for most of January but one borrower did default on a 0.2 BTC loan (0.2 - nothing really?! Well yes, actually, it was £100 back then!!) In this instance, the user claimed their ID had been stolen by way of a Gmail compromise - their identity documents left in their "sent" folder from a previous credit application, and allegedly used to sign up to BTCJam and take out a loan. Whether or not this was true is largely irrelevant as BTCJam could only verify the data they were sent, and as that was (again allegedly) a full set of identity documents, for all intents and purposes they were dealing with the genuine article.

After this episode, I became a bit more cautious with my Bitcoins, scrutinising lenders motives more and lending less to single lenders - this paid off and I had a full month with no issues (pitfall number 1: I can't tell you how much I made as there is no transaction history...yet - we are promised this is coming soon).

Then came March (or "Black March" as I like to call it). In this month, I (and many others) fell victim to a number of defaulters, with varying levels of creativity in their stories;

• One borrower just decided he wouldn't bother repaying, and stuck around long enough to taunt his investors about the fact
• Four borrowers took the coins and ran with no word at all
• One borrower claimed they had lost their Bitcoin wallet to a hardware failure on a hosting platform - we eagerly await the outcome of that one
• One borrower had issues with paying back the loan, but is still in contact with the investors so I'm not writing this one off yet
• One borrower, who had worked hard on their reputation, and was highly respected in the community, came up with a story about how his email, Facebook and crucially BTCJam account had been compromised, spurious loans posted, and the proceeds taken without his knowledge. Again, this could have been true (I think he was a grade-A scammer) but this is where BTCJam COULD have done something - at the time, they didn't have two factor authentication. Had they had this, then the story would have been less plausible.
• One borrower got in over their heads and are currently working out how to sort that one out with their investors

So all in all, not a great month - I personally lost 3 BTC in the above scams - the most infuriating one is of the "reputable borrower" who took off with over 10 BTC of other peoples money - I believe this could have been avoided if 2FA had been in place at the time (2FA is available now so hopefully this will never happen again)

I was at the point where I was going to let all my loans mature then pull them out of BTCJam, but  few things have changed (including my risk appetite) which make me think it might be worth sticking around a bit longer. It was a total gamble putting so much of my cash into Bitcoin in the first place, I thought I might as well make it worth my while.

April is looking much better, there are a tighter group of investors and borrowers thanks to the Facebook group ReliableGar mentioned above, and we all look out for each other.

I expect to make back my losses over the course of this month, with careful investment at the forefront, and an army of people and some great tools at our disposal, it is a much safer place to invest than it was 3 months ago. We also have access to a fantastic tool written by one of the Facebook users (http://jam.sd.ai) which gives a wealth of information on borrowers and investors to help people make more informed decisions.

I'm well known by BTCJam for being vocal about what they could do to improve things, the good thing is they do listen, 2FA being a good example, just a shame it cost investors so much before they got there.

Credit where its due though, Alexis and Flavio are working hard to make BTCJam work, and the Facebook group are spurring them on regularly. If you fancy dropping by, just search for "Investors of BTCJam.com" on Facebook and we'll welcome you with open arms.

[bgaer]

As a heavy lender and borrower on BTCJam let me say the following:

#1 - why would you think its improper to have more then 1 loan at same time?  I have 3 cars - and 3 car loans.   I qualified for all 3 and by having 3 it lowers my credit score.  BTCJam works under the same principle.   You can actively see how many loans a person has out and for how much at the time you decide to invest.   So this point is null and void.


#2 - there are 2 types of loans - btc loans and fiat linked loans.   The poster saying they got back less then they invested because of the change in value of btc - was investing in a fiat linked loan.  SImple - dont even invest in fiat linked loans and that is not a problem.    So this point is resolved.

#3 - scammers - yes there are scammers.   Suggestion is to invest in A and B rated borrowers with a history of repayment.  Anyone else invest very cautiously or very small amounts.   As for 1 bad loan knocking out 10 good ones?   I dont get your math.   My average loan investment amount as a lender is around .025 btc per loan at average interest rate of 5% per payment period.   If 1 guy doesnt pay me I get it back rather quickly.   Out of over 50 loans I have invested in - I have had 3 people default.   I am very much in the green.

#4 - Interest rates - they are per payment period.  So if you decide to pay daily - you will be paying the choosen interest daily.    So if you do a 1 btc loan, paid back daily at 1% - you will be paying 1% daily.   If you do 1 btc with weekly payback at 1% - you will be paying back 1% weekly.   This is not very clear - they really should make this much more obvious to borrowers and lenders.


Look  like every platform BTCJam has its issues - but what makes BTCJam strive is the community.  There is a very strong community and it has offshoots that include real life friends, investment clubs, mining groups, google plus hangouts....etc.  The members of this community stick together to inform each other about scammers, suspicous activity, improvements to the system etc.

So if your interested in using BTCJam I suggest you stop by the USER community on facebook - which is 100% USER run and ADMINed by USERS.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/btcinvestors/


Its a great platform, and yes you can earn significant coin if you are cautious and listen to the community members advice on what to watch out for.  Yes there are scammers every once in awhile - and the users and the company are striving to fix that but you will always have jerks in the world.

[gh2k]

I'm currently up with both my investing and borrowing activity on BTC Jam. I think it's a great site.. However, that's not to say the site doesn't have its problems.

I actually put together a 'companion' site that scrapes all of the publicly-available data on 'Jam, and presents it in a more easy to read fashion. You can view it at http://jam.sd.ai/ - Along with other members of the community, I've tried to identify a few metrics that show good borrowing activity, and as a result help to identify good investments. (BTC Jam itself doesn't display data very well, and it's hard to discover what you need to know.)

On the back of this, I've invested a total of over 7 BTC, of which 4.8 has been paid back with interest, and only 0.01 is overdue. That's pretty good going. I've also managed to leverage my reasonable reputation to borrow amounts of BTC I wouldn't normally be able to get my hands on, and have been paying back on time.

The thing is, BTC Jam is set up to encourage you to scatter small amounts around a large pool of borrowers, but I find it's better to spend time researching the individuals involved, and investing larger amounts with those.

There are some things that the admins could do that would benefit, however. As far as I can tell, they don't take much action before the loan becomes officially "in default", which I think is ~180 days after the last overdue payment. (They can correct me if I am wrong about this.) -- In my experience from running a business, 9 out of 10 customers with overdue payments will cough up if you phone them and ask them to. BTC Jam have verified numbers for all borrowers, so this is really something they should be doing.

As I understand it, they're currently 4 people but have just got some VC funding so I'm hoping this will grow, and they'll be putting someone in whose job is to do collections. I'm pretty sure that will help.

There are scammers on the site, no doubt. But if you actually spend a little time checking up on borrowers first, you can usually avoid them.

[zenojis]

Hello, I started using BTCJam roughly a month ago. I have to say that it is an awesome idea. The website could use a lot of work. Same goes for the community. I started out by putting one of my bitcoins on the website. I spent probably two or three days researching the history of the website and all of the people who seemed to be active on the website. Then, I started investing in people. Generally I invest 0.01 and limit myself to that much per-person, even if they have multiple loan requests. On occasion I tried investing 0.1, but I am now much more careful about that because the one bad loan I invested in was a case where I invested 0.1. Sometimes when someone seems honest but for whatever reason seems high risk (they have a good plan, but bad credentials or vice versa) I will invest 0.001, just as a way of following the loan and seeing what happens.

After investing in everything that seemed worth investing in, I still had half a bitcoin left over, so I took that off the website and put it back into my own wallet. So far it looks like I only have one loan that has/will default. Unfortunately, that one is 0.1 or 1/5 of the money I have on the site. I will mention that I don't really like the loans which are linked to the usd/btc rate because I am interested in making bitcoins, not cash. If there is a chance you will get less bitcoins back from an investment, why not just hold onto your coins? Anyway, it looks like I will actually make up my loss because of a few high interest rate loans (which have already been paying, so I know they aren't scammers). Hopefully this website builds momentum. Hopefully the developers improve the website too, because right now there are a lot of problems.

One of the biggest problems with BTCJam is that the late fee is 0.5 bitcoins. This is ridiculous. People who wouldn't be scammers turn into scammers because they can't or don't want to pay the late fee. There are many other problems with the website's technical, and formal design, I don't want to waste my time detailing all the problems in this thread though.

Overall, BTCJam is one of many new platforms in an ever-evolving online marketplace. Bitcoin is not for the average investor, and BTCJam is even less so. You need to dedicate mindfulness and patience if you don't want to get burned. Bitcoin loaning to me is a much more interesting prospect than bitcoin mining or bitcoin securities when it comes to investing, I think more people should be thinking about it.

Thanks for reading my post
--Chase Vasic

[superresistant]

Yeah yeah... noob-sock-accounts talking on how BTCjam is great is the proof that you should avoid this service.

[gh2k]

Yeah yeah... noob-sock-accounts talking on how BTCjam is great is the proof that you should avoid this service.

I think I've been around here a while.

[superresistant]

Yeah yeah... noob-sock-accounts talking on how BTCjam is great is the proof that you should avoid this service.

I think I've been around here a while.

Take back your BTC before it's too late.
What are you waiting for ?

[thy]

There is some problem with btcjam's site today.

Btcjam support please respond, ballance incorrect on my account, many btc missing, site down at the moment to and no response on emails yet.

Edit: Balance has been corrected and site has been up and running for quite some time now.

[thy]

There's a message at there blog now.

"Securiy Updates

BTCjam has gone offline for security updates with our servers. We will be back online soon with the site resuming as normal. All automatic payments will continue to go through. If you experience a late payment, please e-mail support@btcjam.com. Thank you."

[gh2k]

Yeah yeah... noob-sock-accounts talking on how BTCjam is great is the proof that you should avoid this service.

I think I've been around here a while.

Take back your BTC before it's too late.
What are you waiting for ?

I realise I'm feeding the trolls here, but honestly I am OK with BTC Jam. I think there are some things that they really ought to do better, and I am hassling them about that. They need better transparency WRT how they follow up on late payments, they need better information on the state of play WRT active loans, and they could go a long way in improving their security. Also, their API is somewhat on the incomplete site. However, the product as a whole is an okay one and it could be excellent with a few tweaks. I'd call it a high risk investment right now, but good returns if you spend time picking your borrowers carefully.

They've had some VC funding now, so I'm hoping this works out for them and it improves. I think it's suffered from one-developer-with-a-day-job syndrome until now. They also responded pretty quickly to the heartbleed issue. Admittedly, coins were stolen but as far as I hear it they are being returned. And they had *finally* enabled 2fa not long before, so that mitigated it.

[superresistant]

Yeah yeah... noob-sock-accounts talking on how BTCjam is great is the proof that you should avoid this service.

I think I've been around here a while.

Take back your BTC before it's too late.
What are you waiting for ?

I realise I'm feeding the trolls here, but honestly I am OK with BTC Jam. I think there are some things that they really ought to do better, and I am hassling them about that. They need better transparency WRT how they follow up on late payments, they need better information on the state of play WRT active loans, and they could go a long way in improving their security. Also, their API is somewhat on the incomplete site. However, the product as a whole is an okay one and it could be excellent with a few tweaks. I'd call it a high risk investment right now, but good returns if you spend time picking your borrowers carefully.
They've had some VC funding now, so I'm hoping this works out for them and it improves. I think it's suffered from one-developer-with-a-day-job syndrome until now. They also responded pretty quickly to the heartbleed issue. Admittedly, coins were stolen but as far as I hear it they are being returned. And they had *finally* enabled 2fa not long before, so that mitigated it.

I am not trolling. I really lost money using this service because nothing was explained and the support wasn't answering on time.

The service can probably improve but I can't help but hate them.

[SportsBet]

Yeah yeah... noob-sock-accounts talking on how BTCjam is great is the proof that you should avoid this service.

I think I've been around here a while.

Take back your BTC before it's too late.
What are you waiting for ?

BTCjam is runned by very respectable people. They are already VC funded and featured at the coinsummit.
Their idea is pretty awesome.

You on the other hand are being emotional and unreasonable due to your own failure to properly understand what you are getting into.
It took me exactly 15seconds to look at their listings and see an obvious difference - some are in BTC, some are in BitStampUSD. Doh.


There is a clear reasoning as to why both options exist. Some people are bullish on bitcoin, some people are bearish (lets not forget loans vary from 7days to 180days and more, thats a whole lot considering btc volatility).
Imagine a borrower thinking of borrowing BTC converting to fiat, paying for service/salaries/whatever, then having to buy back into btc at higher price. Obviously thats a problem.
Or the other way around, a lender who is bearish on BTC is thinking of investing BTC, he waits to recover BTC loans at 5%interest and price of btc drops 20%.
So thats why they got both.

Please stop trolling

. However, currently, our repayment rates are above 90% and investors are getting 19% APR

Could you give more information on this? I mean was the rate 50% 10months and then you had one good month (december?) at 90%?
How up to date is that figure?

Why not publish more information on those defaulted loans, so that we can all learn from it?
Dont be scared to make the interface too complicated - the more data and stats the better!

Also start replying here more often, hire more support to help. Live chats, open phone lines, 24hr reply time on all emails, etc.
You really are slacking in that regard.

[Hamarall]

I put around 0.5 BTC into BTCJam.
After investing in 10 loans, my balance is now 0.04848149 BTC

I have 0.38 In defaulted loans.

I paid $34 for the 1/2 BTC I invested. 
I turned it into $29.71 at today's prices.

Not a real great environment to risk your BTC.

sending money to anonymous strangers who have no obligation to pay you back doesn't usually work out well

Em BTCJam as pessoas podem até ser estranhas mais anônimas não,porque ao fazer parte do site é enviado uma serie de documentos e dados de identificação.

[Hamarall]

Observando aqui atentamente todos os comentários dos prós e contras vejo que o site BTCJam tem ainda muitas coisas boas a proporcionar tanto aos investidores quanto aos mutuários,porque sempre terá alguém a investir e outro que está a procurar por um empréstimo que esteja de acordo com suas condições de pagá-lo.Felizmente existem pessoas boas mias também sabemos que infelizmente existem as más pessoas que terminam prejudicando o serviço e dificultando os trabalhos para aquelas pessoas que tem boas intenções e são verdadeiras.
     Fico torcendo para que o site ha cada dia possa estar trabalhando melhor e com mais segurança e que possa trazer melhorias em sua plataforma aqui já relatadas por outros usuários.

[snaxion]

I've been playing around with BTCJam for the last couple of months. I have about a 10% default rate, but the loans are around 30% so I am netting 20% for the time being.

I really like the idea of p-2-p lending (ala prosper.com), but I am just too worried that the BTC will vanish the instant I put some real numbers into the account. My gut tells me these BTCJam guys are legit, however.

[sergiom]

I've seen and used bitjam and personally I hate it
I've been using bitbond.net and they're payouts are always on time, and have a great verification system and credit rating system.

I haven't been ripped off once (yet!)

[monbux]

So, I used BTCjam and invested about 3 BTC there.  Most of it didn't make it.

Must I explain further?      Seriously, it's complete bull up there.  Actually, when it first came out, all users needed to borrow was an EMAIL.  Like, WDF.

[sergiom]

So, I used BTCjam and invested about 3 BTC there.  Most of it didn't make it.

Must I explain further?      Seriously, it's complete bull up there.  Actually, when it first came out, all users needed to borrow was an EMAIL.  Like, WDF.

It's outrageous...at least now you receive their identity though and I noticed you need face ID to

[monbux]

So, I used BTCjam and invested about 3 BTC there.  Most of it didn't make it.

Must I explain further?      Seriously, it's complete bull up there.  Actually, when it first came out, all users needed to borrow was an EMAIL.  Like, WDF.

It's outrageous...at least now you receive their identity though and I noticed you need face ID to

No... Net-arb sent me an email months ago that they were starting an Arbitration for the loans... never received any word since :/