BTCJam

Alright, its been hectic with the holidays coming up but I will do my best to keep some updates coming.  Sorry!

In addition to my other posts I have also been doing some mining out of our apartment and, now that I've earned a bit I realized I needed to do something with my BTC... and thats when I found BTCJam.

www.btcjam.com

The short version: BTCJam is a P2P bitcoin lending site.  You invest some BTC (or fractions there of) in loans of your choosing which are listed on the site.  All payments are handled through the BTCJam site, so after you create an account you actual send the bitcoins you wish to invest to them, and then do all of the investing in to individual loans through the site.  It has a very user friendly interface and so far my experience has been 100% positive.

When users list a loan, they include how much they would like to borrow, the time period for re-payment, and the interest rate they are willing to pay.  Each individual investor contributes a fraction of what is being asked - essential crowd-funding bitcoin loans.  The borrower will also usually include a note as to what they want to use the loan for.  Most of the ones I am seeing are for "reputation building".  After you invest in a loan, and are repaid (or not, as sadly some users do default) the expectation is that you will leave feedback about the borrower.  Essential, these "reputation building" loans are just to get good feedback, so that the borrower can ask for bigger loans and/or a lower interest rate for future loans.

When searching for loans to invest in there a number of way to filter the results.  By Amount @ Interest, Payment Type, % Funded, Loan term, User reputation & BTCJam Rating.  I generally use the "% Funded" filter so I can invest in loans that are close to going live; as obviously the sooner the loan is fully funded the sooner I'll receive my payment.  Also, its a good way to see what other users think is trustworthy / worth investing in - because those are the ones that get funded the most quickly.

Another quick note, some loans are listed as "MTGox Linked" which means that the value of repayment fluctuates depending on the value of 1btc versus another currency, such as the US Dollar.  Given that the price of Bitcoins has been SURGING in a huge way lately its likely that an investment in one of these will result in you receiving fewer bitcoins than you initially invested.  However, if the price were to drop, you would receive proportionally more - so its a valuable tool for hedging against price moves.

As of this writing I have invested in 21 loans.  10 of them are still pending (meaning they haven't reached their funding goal), 10 of them are active and 1 has already been repaid.  Sadly, my 1 repaid loan was MTGox linked so I ended up losing .009btc; however, in US Dollars, I earned 6% which isn't bad.

I've made a pretty excel spreadsheet for keeping track of my investments.  As I get more experience with the BTCJam website I'll keep it updated and maybe share some of my results here - such as good people to loan money to, % of investments which were defaulted on, overall % yield, etc.

I haven't tried borrowing any bitcoins yet through the site as I don't really need them... but I'll probably try that whole part of the system at some point soon and add an update for that as well.

www.btcjam.com

Happy Thanksgiving for those that celebrate it!