Here are two interesting articles I stumbled across today that I wanted to share. Enjoy!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/12/03/the-tricky-business-of-taxing-bitcoin/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/03/heres-what-critics-miss-about-bitcoins-long-term-potential/
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
BTCJam Lending Updates
So, I've been on BTCJam.com for a bit over a week now lending out some of my bitcoins and so far it has been a pretty darn positive experience for me; I would very much recommend it! I am planning to update this blog with some of the statistics from my lending so that it may, hopefully, help someone, somewhere.
*Please note, this is not intended to be lending advice. This is all just my personal experience with the site*
So, as of now, I have 16 active loans in which I have invested, I have 6 pending loans and I have 5 repaid loans.
My 16 active loans are a combined .27 BTC - so not a whole ton of money invested on my part. Of those 16, 1 is late; currently by 3 days.
Of my 5 repaid loans, 4 of them have been paid off early. I find this pretty encouraging. From what I can tell of the community most of the people involved take this very seriously which is great. Currently I am sitting at a very pleasant 12.92% return on my loans. Now, I'm no economist or accountant (though I would love to learn more about all that!) I am pretty sure 12.92% return in roughly 2 weeks is a whopping 336% return over the course of a year. (12.92% / 2 = 6.46% per week * 52 weeks = ~336%. Please correct me if this is not actually how this works; but it makes sense in my head!). This number would be even higher if I hadn't invested in a "MtGox Linked" loan which, while it increased the dollar value of my holdings, did reduce my bitcoin holdings. You can read my previous BTCJam posting for more info on the MtGox Linked loans.
My personal goal with my investments has been to get in on pretty much anything that is offering over 4% and I have been investing on average .0139 BTC in each loan. As I get paid back, I have just been rolling my investments over in to new loans. As I get more comfortable with all this I expect that my average investment will probably actually go down to about .01 BTC. I think its a little safer to keep the money spread out a bit more and by spreading my money out it means I will theoretically be getting payments more frequently as well as loans mature on different dates. I have also been investing almost exclusively in 15-60 day loans; however BTCJam allows for loans as long as 1 year. I expect I will also begin investing in some longer maturity loans as time goes on so that I can try and keep up this rate of return.
Here's my list of folks who have paid back on time or early thus far:
Gappie
VictorBC
keknow
Just
The Fabled (1st payment was a day late, but paid off the whole loan at once 3 weeks early)
And investments which may have been a mistake:
Futures (currently 3 days late)
Happy bitcoining (totally a verb)!
www.btcjam.com
*Please note, this is not intended to be lending advice. This is all just my personal experience with the site*
So, as of now, I have 16 active loans in which I have invested, I have 6 pending loans and I have 5 repaid loans.
My 16 active loans are a combined .27 BTC - so not a whole ton of money invested on my part. Of those 16, 1 is late; currently by 3 days.
Of my 5 repaid loans, 4 of them have been paid off early. I find this pretty encouraging. From what I can tell of the community most of the people involved take this very seriously which is great. Currently I am sitting at a very pleasant 12.92% return on my loans. Now, I'm no economist or accountant (though I would love to learn more about all that!) I am pretty sure 12.92% return in roughly 2 weeks is a whopping 336% return over the course of a year. (12.92% / 2 = 6.46% per week * 52 weeks = ~336%. Please correct me if this is not actually how this works; but it makes sense in my head!). This number would be even higher if I hadn't invested in a "MtGox Linked" loan which, while it increased the dollar value of my holdings, did reduce my bitcoin holdings. You can read my previous BTCJam posting for more info on the MtGox Linked loans.
My personal goal with my investments has been to get in on pretty much anything that is offering over 4% and I have been investing on average .0139 BTC in each loan. As I get paid back, I have just been rolling my investments over in to new loans. As I get more comfortable with all this I expect that my average investment will probably actually go down to about .01 BTC. I think its a little safer to keep the money spread out a bit more and by spreading my money out it means I will theoretically be getting payments more frequently as well as loans mature on different dates. I have also been investing almost exclusively in 15-60 day loans; however BTCJam allows for loans as long as 1 year. I expect I will also begin investing in some longer maturity loans as time goes on so that I can try and keep up this rate of return.
Here's my list of folks who have paid back on time or early thus far:
Gappie
VictorBC
keknow
Just
The Fabled (1st payment was a day late, but paid off the whole loan at once 3 weeks early)
And investments which may have been a mistake:
Futures (currently 3 days late)
Happy bitcoining (totally a verb)!
www.btcjam.com
Monday, December 2, 2013
Cointube (Update)
Looks like cointube.tv lowered their payout to 5 uBTC per video watched - probably something to do with the rising value of bitcoins? Still... Sad :(
Friday, November 29, 2013
China is the key to the rapidly rising price of bitcoins?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/buyer-beware-bitcoins-fate-could-231628139.html
Just an interesting article I found which I wanted to pass along. Its true, the price has risen at astonishing speed, especially over the last couple of weeks. Here's hoping that the "Cautious nod" from the Chinese government translates to a continued increase in value!
Just an interesting article I found which I wanted to pass along. Its true, the price has risen at astonishing speed, especially over the last couple of weeks. Here's hoping that the "Cautious nod" from the Chinese government translates to a continued increase in value!
Thursday, November 28, 2013
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!
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!
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Cointube
More free bitcoins!
Check out www.cointube.tv if you want some more easy free bitcoins. On this website just enter your wallet address and watch a video and boom, free BTC. Payout is 20 uBTC per video watched and they pay out once per hours, regardless of the amount. All you have to do is enter a captcha between each video. Usually after watching a few it brings up a message saying they are out of videos and asking you to check back in an hour. Generally speaking this seems to be true and you can make between 60 and 180 Ubtc per hour no sweat. Again, this isn't much in the grand scheme of things but its not bad considering how little work is involved.
Check out www.cointube.tv if you want some more easy free bitcoins. On this website just enter your wallet address and watch a video and boom, free BTC. Payout is 20 uBTC per video watched and they pay out once per hours, regardless of the amount. All you have to do is enter a captcha between each video. Usually after watching a few it brings up a message saying they are out of videos and asking you to check back in an hour. Generally speaking this seems to be true and you can make between 60 and 180 Ubtc per hour no sweat. Again, this isn't much in the grand scheme of things but its not bad considering how little work is involved.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Bitvisitor (Update)
Looks like Bitvisitor has changed so that they now send payment every 60 uBTC. Sadly, in addition to this, they also seem to have lowered the payout per site visited :(
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