Quote from: Liddell on December 24, 2014, 02:55:36 PM

@Puppet, I really appreciate the real good work you have been doing with the cloudmining scam busting thread of yours.

However why so pessimistic about any investmenrs within the btc ecosystem? To generalize them all as bad is kind of weird.

Its not so weird if you've been around bitcoin for as long as I have. Out of many 100's, maybe 1000 IPO's and investment opportunities of all kinds, I recall only 1 that paid out substantially more btc than it raised (AM) and 1 that paid out a little more than it raised (satoshidice). The rest were all overpriced mining contracts, scams, ponzi's, failed businesses or a mix of them that paid at best a fraction back of the money they raised.

This shouldnt be surprising either. There are fundamental reasons why investing btc doesnt make sense. Firstly, like gold, BTC is a commodity, it can not be created from debt like fiat money can. It doesnt matter how well the bitcoin economy does, it doesnt increase the number of bitcoins in circulation. So the bitcoins needed to pay interest rates arent created. Again, same as gold, you dont go investing gold either, because it makes as little sense. Secondly, unless basically all your business' costs and revenue are BTC denominated, borrowing BTC never makes sense, since you have no way of knowing just how much you are going to have to pay back. A shark loan would be less risky.

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My understanding is both btcjam and bitlendingclub are legit companies moving headquarters to San Francisco, backed by legit accelerator programs ans VC money. 15-20% apr and 4-6% default rate sounds pretty good to me. I started playing with both of those platforms with 1% of my btc and have now slowly inceeased it to ~5%.

I have not looked in depth at either, quite possibly the companies themselves might be legit, but common sense dictates that lending BTC is going to be very risky at best. Im fairly certain scammers are currently borrowing and repaying to improve their trust or rating or whatever they use, until they can borrow enough to ake it worth running. Also Im quite curious to see what will happen to these platforms if/when BTC exchange rate goes ballistic again. How many will be unable to service their debt then?

My cold wallet over the years has increased in value by ~10000% and not a satoshi was ever lost. Why would you risk it all for another 1 or 5%? I dont get that.