Good question. I am trying to use the platform, but it's not going very well. See here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=558325

What do you guys think of cryptothrift.com?

Since bitmit closed down, I've been looking for an alternative, and some weeks ago, I made an account there. Unfortunately, so far, my experience with them has been quite negative...

Minor problems:

• Annoying animated ads on the frontpage. This is already a site centered around selling me goods for money, why do you need to annoy me with animated third party ads on top of that?
• Altcoins everywhere. Normally I just ignore altcoins, but in this case they just help clutter up an already cluttered page layout.
• When clicking on a category on the left, not only is the layout completely switched around, there are no subcategories offered to click on, the search bar disappers, and the (broken) location filter is not even offered any more.

Problems of moderate importance:

• The location filter simply does not work unless you are logged in. For an internationally operating site like cryptothrift, it is really important for visitors to be able to filter out stuff that the seller won't even ship to them, otherwise finding things you are looking for is only that much more of a chore.
• There are too few categories, and only two levels of them.
• There are no category-specific attributes for searching (for example video memory, chip manufacturer and connectors for graphics cards).
• In the background, all prices are in USD. This is not useful for me. I live in the EU, USD prices are not important to me in every day life. I'd like to price things (including delivery options) in any currency, including Bitcoin if I so choose!

Major problems:

• You can give only two shipping options when listing an item, local and worldwide. This is a major problem for someone in the EU. Back when I was selling on Bitmit, the majority of my buyers were from inside the EU but outside my home country. In cryptothrift, I can now choose between offering those potential buyers really unattractive shipping rates or exposing myself to the risk of making a major loss on shipping if someone from Australia, for example, decides to buy my item.
• The items I put up for sale are only visible when browsing the appropriate category when I'm logged in. When I'm not logged in, they just don't show up. I don't see myself ever selling my items this way.

On the plus side, the support is usually pretty quick to answer. On the downside to the plus side, they don't always manage to solve my problems...

As of right now, the only reason I'm still even using cryptothrift is because they are the only game in town when it comes to selling small time items for Bitcoin. I'm hoping they will step up their game and/or get some serious competition. If things continue like this, I'll probably rather just sell my things on ebay (or maybe hood.de) and exchange the proceeds for Bitcoin manually...

*edit 2014-04-09:
The issue with my items not being visible when I'm not logged in has been solved. I still don't know what happened there.

This doesn't work for me. When I select my country from the drop-down menu, the site will reload, and the drop-down menu will be back to "Worldwide". I have tried with two different browser (Konqueror and Firefox), it's the same problem in both. Both these browsers are configured to accept cookies from cryptothrift.com.

Even it was working, there are more problems with this feature:

• It is not clear to the user that this is supposed to filter by "shipping to". Me, I assumed this was a filter for the item's location until I found this forum post.
• The dropdown is not available in when a category is selected.
• Even if this feature were working exactly as advertised, I still couldn't filter out listings that would ship to my location, but only at prices I am not willing to pay. (Like 0.4 BTC shipping from Australia to Europe for 0.1 BTC item...)

IMHO, this feature working correctly is massively important for an internationally operating auction site like yours. I looking for attractive items on your site feels like a chore (which it does atm), but will likely not be very willing to do it.

I really hope Bitmit comes back at some point. All the alternatives I've tried were major disappointments in comparison to what bitmit was - and bitmit was not even that good in the first place...

By the way, it is beyond me why you have ignored this and decided to just stick with the name bitbond. TradeFortress is right, the name Bit bond is burned among the bitcoin community (a.k.a. your primary target audience). You might as well call yourself "The Bernie Madoff Fund Of Guaranteed Profits". Your rationalizations of the name don't matter, people won't even see them. They will see the name bitbond and decide not to bother reading anything else you have to say. Hint: If you find you need to defend your brand name or marketing decisions to your target audience, you are probably doing it wrong.

Also, calling yourself an "unbank"? I don't care what you think about banks or what you think your target audience thinks about banks, "un" is a negative prefix, and it leads to negative associations. It's not a good choice of you want to market something.

You need to talk to someone who knows how to do marketing, and soon. Don't pretend you don't have a problem, because you apparent inability to attract lenders lately says otherwise.

I have been using bitbond.net for a short time. Here are some thoughts on it:

They are definitely different from btcjam. More bureaucratic, but (hopefully) also more thorough. The company behind it is a GmbH, which is not easy or cheap to incorporate. (Not that this guarantees anything, but still...)

They don't do this whole reputation loan thing that goes on at BTCJam, and I think it's a good thing that they don't. IMHO, the btcjam reputation loans are a stupid idea, and they come down to buying yourself a good credit rating, especially if the borrower pays back early.

Interest rates on the site are always given "per annum". BTCJam gives interest rates over the term of the loan, which massively distorts your view on the real interest rate, especially for short-term loans. I can only assume that some of the borrowers on btcjam have never done the math, or else they would realize they are borrowing money at a p.a.-equivalent rate of 40 to 50%...

Their plan on dealing with non-paying borrowers seems more solid than BTCJam's. As a lender, I would feel more confident investing lots of coins on bitbond.net than on BTCJam. (Especially since they happen to be in the same jurisdiction as I am...)

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.

I also think the interest rates they set are much too high. We are dealing with a deflationary currency here, after all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Germany, a notary's fees are fixed by law, and they're in Euros. A notary cannot just set his own fee or decide to be payed in something else.

That doesn't matter if all split off pools stay under the control of the same person or group. It would just make the problem less obvious to the general public.

I've bought a game (Anno 2070) from them back in April, which went well enough, although could have been a lot faster.

This weekend, I was trying to buy Battlefield 3, but without success. Apparently, the payment provider they are using for their store, bit-pay, is under-going maintenance and has been unavailable all weekend. When I emailed the bitcoin2cdkey support about this, and inquired about a rough eta for when it will be back, I got this response:


This is far from from the response I had expected, and, IMHO, extremely unprofessional. When your online store isn't working because your payment provider has an outage, you don't just sit back and direct your own customers to your payment provider's support, you raise a stink with that provider yourself until the problem is fixed! Never even mind that, with bitcoin, you shouldn't even need an external "payment provider"...

Hi,

I have joined the board because I was planning to post a buy offer for a beginner's FPGA board on the Economy > Marketplace > Goods Subforum.

Please let me out of the newbie board!