Thank you for your feedback, it's highly appreciated!
They do not allow borrowers to set their own interest rates, but rather dictate interest on what they think the borrower's credit rating should be, which kinda goes against the whole free market idea.
There are three ways of how to set interest rates on p2p lending platform:
1) let the borrower set the rate
2) let the borrower set a starting rate and then auction it off, so those lenders who bid the lowest interest rate are the ones who get to invest
3) the platform conducts a credit check and sets the rate according to creditworthiness
All three are legitimate concepts. The reason why on Bitbond.net we set the rates as in 3) is that experience from other p2p lending platform shows that it seems to produce the best results for both, borrowers an lenders. One popular example is the second largest US based p2p lending platform
www.prosper.com. They started with interest rate setting as described in 2) and switched to 3) after they saw that interest rates did not reflect the default risks of borrowers correctly. Lenders weren't earning sufficient returns and the marketplace was close to stop. After they (and many others like LendingClub) changed their pricing to method 3) p2p lending started to work for them. I will post are more elaborate article about this on our blog soon.
I also think the interest rates they set are much too high. We are dealing with a deflationary currency here, after all.
I think this depends on the level of interest rates in your economy. Where you have high inflation, rates might be very low, with low inflation, rates are relatively high. But with currently low central bank interest rates in the Euro zone, bank loans have much higher interest rates that are not not far away from our's. After all, both sides need to be happy and that's what the rates are aimed at.
They have very few listings, most of the time they don't have any. I'm assuming this is probably due to a combination of them not being very well known yet and checking every loan applicant a bit more thoroughly, but I don't really know.
There is a number of reasons to this. We have been getting our terms of use straight for a while and weren't unlocking any new borrower accounts. Also, we're still quite new to the market so yes, we need to gain more publicity. And third, it is correct that our checks are quite thorough. There are new borrower aplicants every day but only very few of them are willing to disclose the information we require. And only those borrowers get their account unlocked, who fulfill the requirements. It's a trade off between having many users and the quality of the projects on the platform and I'm not willing to sacrifice on the quality of our credit check.
A few more checks on the listings would be nice. For example, there's one listing that says "Real estate development. Revenues will come from tenants.". Sounds nice, but it would sound even nicer with a little note besides it among the lines of "Bitbond.net can confirm that this borrower owns real estate that can be rented out to tenants.".
They are much bigger on privacy than BTCJam. You don't get to see a user id or name of the borrower, and you don't get to see a list of investors for a given loan. There's also no way of commenting on a loan or any other way, really, for user's to communicate via the site.
One of the next things that are on the to-do list is a public communication system. I think it would be of help, if there was a commenting function where lenders ask questions to borrowers and the answers are all public. It will be hard for us as a platform to verify every detail of each listing but when such questions arise, I believe there should be a way to address the borrower directly. What do you think, would this help? There is a long to do list so I'm taking suggestions which help us to prioritize.
There's a listing up there right now for a 36 months loan of 112 BTC at 11.66% p.a. IMHO, Bitcoin-denominated loans over such long term are a bad idea. Bitcoin still fluctuates wildly in value, and there is no way of knowing where it will stand in 3 years. If there is another big spike in value, it is very likely that the borrower will have to default.
This is certainly a valid point. But there is only one thing we really do know, and that is we don't know what's going to happen to the Bitcion price. If we have a 36m loan and the price goes down, the borrower benefits (in case they converted to a fiat currency). If the price goes up, the lenders benefit since they earn the interest plus the price move up. There is no way to predict what is going to happen but one thing that can be observed is that Bitcoin volatility is decreasing, as I have outlined here
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6543/bitcoin-volatility-analysis/. This doesn't mean the price can't go up, but the swings tend to become smaller which is good for Bitcoin loans in general.
One other solution would be to offer loans that are pegged to an exchange rate but it would only reverse the problem. I'm still thinking about it, though.
They don't have a support or contact form on their website. Bad move, even if they are reachable via bitcointalk.
They don't (yet?) have a way of selling bonds again. This is bad for lenders who want to get out of a loan because they suddenly need the money or because they have changed their mind on a loan.
On the left side of the browser window there should be w widget that says "Feedback & Support". It's a UserVoice app where you can either leave public comments or send an email to spport via a contact form. If it doesn't appear this might be due to your browser settings. You are also welcome to send an email to service(at)bitbond.net!
I'm planning to establish a secondary market, it's definitely on the list as this adds value to the site. However, currently there are other product related priorities. Stay tuned and again, always happy to take suggestions.
