BTCJam A revolution in lending?

1/03/2015 02:33:00 am Unknown 0 Comments

I have been meaning to blog about BTCJam for some weeks now, but i've been to interested in funding loans and watching payments come in to bother to share my experience with you all.

I do somewhat regret my decision not to blog earlier as since I've started to use BTCJam I've also found out and started to invest in Bitlending club.  It does mean that I will be giving a slightly less glowing reference to BTCjam in light of using it's far superior rival BitLending Club.



Anyway let my critique begin........

BTCJam is a crowdfunding platform for people and organisations to take out loans. These loans are funded by the crowd, made up by investors (like me) who are willing to invest and wait for the repayments (with interest of course). The beauty of this concept is that it means that the banks and payday loan companies can keep their noses out of our financial affairs, and hopefully people can borrow at lower than loan shark rates and people can invest with a better return than the nonsense 5% you will get on an isa this year. Of course holding an isa is a lot easier than searching through the bogus loans on BTCJam to find the gems, but in the last 2 months (which was also my first two months) I've made over 30% ROI, unheard of in banking terms and possibly a little far fetched in stocks and equities. also take into account i'm not an experienced lender and i've fallen foul to plenty of fraudulent loans.

Fraudulent Loans......
I don't want to harp on about the level of fraud found on this site, because it really isn't a deal breaker for me, there a few really annoying things about the site which I will get onto in a bit, but generally, the fraud loans are quite easy to spot and haven't proven enough of a problem to take my impressive earnings down too badly. Let me clarify a fraudulent loan is a loan made by a fraudster impersonating another person, not a loan where the person loses interest and leaves the site or doesn't bother to return, or where they run into trouble and then simply run away. Often investors on BTCJam label people as fraudsters just because the loans gone bad, I call that being a sore loser. :)

The main problem with BTCJam is that the site itself takes payment from the moment the loan is activated, so even if the loan is fraudulent then BTCJam get paid, this is obviously bad as it means they have less incentive to weed out the bad loans before they are offered and financed. Not to suggest that BTCJam don't care if it's users get defrauded or not, but it's clear that they still get paid.

Censorship.......
The biggest bug I have to bear with Btcjam is the level of censorship on the site, they won't allow the sharing of websites or the use of certain words in your comments and loan applications, while they will cite that this is to 'protect you', it's clearly just a way of them trying to have a little more control over users communication than they should be attempting to gain, this for me is the single reason for me to ever leave the site (won't happen anytime soon though, the profit is too good). I get the feeling that if BTCJam become successful they will go the way of Apple, Paypal and HP and but users a distant second to profits. But that's all speculation.

Verification.................
BTCJam does the usual KYC stuff, I've already uploaded enough information to them to make stealing my 'identity' a piece of cake, I'm not to clingy with my 'identity' so it's ok, but it may prove a problem for others who want to borrow on the site. however I cannot see a way around this style of verification and the BTCjam system is quick and painless, I had my documents verified within 48 hours.

All in all BTCJam has become one of my most used sites, and a great place to meet new people and learn about what's happening in the crypto world, and while I don't feel it's the best in it's genre, I feel you should all definitely sign up and make a bit of interest on there. So from me it gets a solid 3/5