Topic: [ANN] BTCJam - Peer to Peer Bitcoin Lending - page 38. (Read 204974 times)

The fees are paid by BTCJam.

The motion is now listed as approved but my remaining payments/installments have not reflected the change.

Thank you for working with me on this Tulkas.

Who pays the judge.me fees?  I believe it is $298

They will suffer consequences, all loans now are subject to international arbitration, our partner is taking a little longer than expected to implement their API but the legal aspects are solved and the documents of the defaulter will be released to the arbitrator and if the award is granted the lenders will be able to start collection, we are now working towards releasing the documents to the lenders also, for now it can be done through a local judge.

All activated loan is a legally binding contract now.

One more thought, as long as we're on the topic of making modifications to loan contracts:

I would like to suggest that BTCJam add a button that investors can click on to cancel their pending investment in a loan, if the loan has not yet been activated. There have been several times when I clicked to invest in a loan, and then (while that loan was still in the funding stage) that borrower defaulted on other loans, or I found out he was a scammer or having financial problems, but there was no way for me to cancel my investment, even though the loan had not yet been activated, so I ended up losing that money. (On several occasions, when I was in this situation, I tried to email support to ask them to cancel my pending investment, and never received a response back.)

Both from a legal and technological perspective, it should be comparatively easy for BTCJam to implement this feature, at least compared to implementing a voting system and dealing with the legal ramifications of modifying a contract that has already been approved by all parties and activated. And it frees up support's time, since lenders could just click on a button to cancel a pending investment, without needing to take up any of customer support's time about the issue.

I have been happy to see the new features added to BTCJam over the last few months, and I am curious to hear more about the new 'voting' feature, either from Tulkas, or from borrowers or investors who have used this feature. I like the potential flexibility this could add to the site, although when it comes to contracts, I also have a lot of  questions about how this flexibility could affect them.

I liked the 'notes' feature (until BTCJam blocked unverified investors from using it), and before I was blocked, I was able to use it to give one of my struggling borrowers a break on the interest costs, and let me get out of my investment and sleep a little better at night without worrying about yet another potential default. At the same time, I worry about some potential for abuse, at least while there are no real consequences for borrowers who default. It seems like several borrowers since the exchange rate went up have basically announced "I do not plan on making any more payments on my loan, so if you want to recover anything else from me, your only recourse is to create a note and sell it to me at a heavily discounted price." I try to be fair as a lender, and depending on the circumstances, I am not opposed to sometimes giving someone more time to make payments, or letting the borrower off the hook for some of the interest, but at the same time, I think this should be purely voluntary, and if the lender does not want to do this, the borrower still has an obligation to repay his/her loan at the agreed-upon terms from when the loan was initiated.

Regarding the voting, this raises more questions in my mind, since the purpose apparently is to modify a loan contract that was initially agreed upon by all parties when they entered into it. For example, will all investors need to approve a motion to modify the loan contract, or just a majority, or some other percentage? If it is anything other than "all investors", how is it determined how many votes each person gets? For example, do all investors have equal voting rights no matter the size of their investments? Is it one vote per unique investor, or per investment? For example, if a user makes two investments in the same loan, would he get 1 vote, or 2?

What if I invest in a loan, and the borrower makes a motion to lower the interest rate, extend the payment time, etc., and for some reason, I can't go along with it? Maybe I was counting on the repayment by a certain date in order to pay one of my own bills, etc., or for some other reason I think the change is not fair to me or in my interests as the lender. I can vote against the change, but if the majority of other voters approve the change, does that mean that it will be applied to me without my consent? If so, is there an option for me to exit the lending contract and have the borrower immediately return the remaining principal to me at that time? And can motions to make changes to the loan contract only be initiated by the borrower, or can lenders do it too?

I just read the below on the new "General FAQ" page:

"Is BTCJam responsible for the loan repayment?

No. This is a P2P bitcoin lending platform, the borrower is the sole responsible for all repayments. If the borrower defaults the loan is sent to our partner judge.me. If the arbitration award is granted the borrower information will be submitted to the local authorities."

Tulkas, can you tell me more about this? Does this mean that defaulted loans will now be sent to collections agencies and/or reported on people's credit reports? And will this apply just to new loans taken out in the future, or is it possible also to do this with some of the older loans? Over the last 6 months I've gradually lost nearly all my BTC investing in loans in BTCJam, and I would love to get some of that back, even if the collections agency takes a % of it. I would also like to see the defaulters, especially the people who defaulted in October-January before the exchange rate skyrocketed, facing some consequences for what they did, and I think BTCJam needs this, if it wants to begin to shed its reputation of being a haven for scammers.
 

Speaking of the motion. Under the approved field it is still listed as "voting in progress" when the voting period should have expired two days ago.

Ah, I guess at some point I did =P
just checked up on it.

Not sure why I'm paying off this months loan installment which is due, considering out of all the loans I have made, only 3 out of 17 payments have been made.

Maybe I should be like everyone else and not care about paying things off when the currency moves against me.

Phil

Did you connect your bitcointalk username to BTCJam?


+confirm

How can you check if u dont know my username on btcjam? lol....

I will check your account and get back to you.

Is there something Im missing?
I deposited only 1BTC
Ive done enough lending and my stats say Received: 1.6xxx BTC
But my balance is only 1.03xx BTC

EVEN if I added up my pending + late .. it comes nowhere close to this magical 1.6xxx Im supposed to have...

So, my question is WHERE is my missing BTC?
Ive taken no BTC out of btcjam

Can arbitration be used even if no default to clarify terms of the loan?  I assume it is no longer thru judge.me (as I never got a response on the arbitration I opened), correct?

BurtW, we have implemented some of that missing features you mentioned:

1) Motions: borrowers can create a motion to change the loan terms, they are submitted to be voted by investors. boonies4u was the first borrower to use it.
2) We have implemented an arbitration system and the identities of the defaulters will be disclosed to lenders if the award is granted, the listing activation agreement is updated and all the loans made after march are subject to it.

We have placed a FAQ online, it will soon cover that new features, i will also announce it here.

I'm sorry for your bad experience in the past, but I believe the system has improved a lot recently.

 

I am not defending it.  I have stated many many times that I believe USD denominated loans are a very bad idea for the lenders (good idea for the borrowers though).

BTW I am also out of here.  Not because I didn't understand the MtGoxUSD gif but because even good and very good loans go bad and then there is nothing I can do to even try to collect them or propose a settlement with the borrower.

When I do loans myself (as I have been doing for years) if the borrower gets into trouble we can talk, modify terms etc.

Here they still do nothing to even try to collect the debt.

I hope that in the future they do implement some collections system and that I may get back some part of the large amount of BTC I lost in this experiment.

Good luck guys.

Small nit but why do you keep that last little 0.0045 BTC?  I tried and I cannot totally clear out my account here.  I find this kind of insulting that after all my losses I cannot get all my remaining BTC back from you.

So if there appears some strange random gif image somewhere on the website in the listing then the entire listing along with the written *NUMBERS* of the payback amount and its boldly visible and totally unambiguous *BTC DENOMINATION* suddenly become totally meaningless? The boldly written and legally bindig promise: "payback: xyz BTC" becomes meaningless by some random gif image on the website but it still remains boldly written ther in the listing: "Payment xyz BTC" instead of being replaced by "Payment: unknown amount in USD, converted into BTC at unknown rate"?´Thats what I call scam..

If this website operates in any sane jurisdiction and the amount would be high enough to make it reasonable to sue them then such a scam would not stand any chance in a court of law. One cannot boldly promise: "Paymant will be x BTC" (clearly having fixed amount and fixed currency) and then silently invalidate this by some hidden alt tag in some small gif image that explains that what is boldly written above is only meant as a joke and not to be taken serious and in reality it will of course be paid not in BTC but in Zimbabwe-Dollars or US-Dollars. Such kind of obvious scam would not stand the slightest chance in any court in any jurisdiction I am aware of.

Anyways, I'm out of here. Its clearly a scam and you are defending it, fortunately the amount I lost is small for me.

If a loan has the "tied to MtGoxUSD" symbol then you will be paid in BTC but the loan is USD denominated.  End of story.  Stop beating your head against the wall.  I am not the wall.  I am just telling you something you did not know before.

MOUSE OVER THE "chained to MtGoxUSD" symbol on one of the loans and read the tooltip very carefully!

I never make these kinds of loans because I am long BTC so thet are stupid.

And if you look even harder then you will see that in the second column the payment is denominated in BTC in this listing and not in USD.