Hello, I started using BTCJam roughly a month ago. I have to say that it is an awesome idea. The website could use a lot of work. Same goes for the community. I started out by putting one of my bitcoins on the website. I spent probably two or three days researching the history of the website and all of the people who seemed to be active on the website. Then, I started investing in people. Generally I invest 0.01 and limit myself to that much per-person, even if they have multiple loan requests. On occasion I tried investing 0.1, but I am now much more careful about that because the one bad loan I invested in was a case where I invested 0.1. Sometimes when someone seems honest but for whatever reason seems high risk (they have a good plan, but bad credentials or vice versa) I will invest 0.001, just as a way of following the loan and seeing what happens.

After investing in everything that seemed worth investing in, I still had half a bitcoin left over, so I took that off the website and put it back into my own wallet. So far it looks like I only have one loan that has/will default. Unfortunately, that one is 0.1 or 1/5 of the money I have on the site. I will mention that I don't really like the loans which are linked to the usd/btc rate because I am interested in making bitcoins, not cash. If there is a chance you will get less bitcoins back from an investment, why not just hold onto your coins? Anyway, it looks like I will actually make up my loss because of a few high interest rate loans (which have already been paying, so I know they aren't scammers). Hopefully this website builds momentum. Hopefully the developers improve the website too, because right now there are a lot of problems.

One of the biggest problems with BTCJam is that the late fee is 0.5 bitcoins. This is ridiculous. People who wouldn't be scammers turn into scammers because they can't or don't want to pay the late fee. There are many other problems with the website's technical, and formal design, I don't want to waste my time detailing all the problems in this thread though.

Overall, BTCJam is one of many new platforms in an ever-evolving online marketplace. Bitcoin is not for the average investor, and BTCJam is even less so. You need to dedicate mindfulness and patience if you don't want to get burned. Bitcoin loaning to me is a much more interesting prospect than bitcoin mining or bitcoin securities when it comes to investing, I think more people should be thinking about it.

Thanks for reading my post
--Chase Vasic