BTCJam : What starts as a scam stays a scam

As kako points out, there's layers upon layers of stupid caked in there. Leaving aside the dubious designⁱ that doesn't even work in its own paradigmⁱⁱ, the proposition is that Bitcoin will definitely go up. Because yeah, that's how Captn's O' Industree think and act. Even admitting, for argument's sake, the scammer's own twisted world... what sense does it make ? So you borrow money in a currency you believe will be appreciating over time. What sense does this make ?ⁱⁱⁱ

This, of course, is by no means novel. Here's a discussion between their rep in the scamforum and my PR agent^iv :

Quote from: Tulkas on December 21, 2012, 05:11:33 PM
Unfortunately I was a little bit too optimistic on that 2 weeks forecast. We plan to use the personal information to collect the debts but we cannot simply hand it to lenders (as much as we sometimes want to do it).

I've just updated the service numbers:

loans: 312
total payments: 1463
payments late: 333
fully repaid loans: 155

We have a repayment rate of 77.23%

This doesn't look like a "scammer heaven" at all.

The listings are as good as the borrowers who make then, as far as censoring the "scammy" listings we are not sure about that.

77% repayment rate IS scammer heaven.

Quote from: MPOE-PR on December 08, 2012, 11:13:57 AM
Let's do some math!

Average loan duration 1 month, average repayment rate 77%, average interest rate 5% per month.

January: start with 1000 BTC, get back 770 btc + 5% interest, for a total of 808.5 BTC
February: start with 808.5 BTC, get back 622.545 btc + 5% interest, for a total of 653.67225 BTC
March: start with 653.67225 BTC, get back 503.3276325 btc + 5% interest, for a total of 528.494014125 BTC
April: start with 528.494014125 BTC, get back 427.28741042 btc + 5% interest, for a total of 448.651780941 BTC
May: start with 448.651780941 BTC, get back 345.461871325 btc + 5% interest, for a total of 362.734964891 BTC
June: start with 362.734964891 BTC, get back 279.305922966 btc + 5% interest, for a total of 293.271219114 BTC
July: look at your 293.271219114 BTC which spells out a 70% realized loss over barely six months and think about what a retard you were.

Once the GLBSE scam mothership is out of the way, Average Forum Idiot is desperately looking for some new ways to ensure his customary BTC losses. All the while telling himself that he's oh so great and "If you know what to look for you won't get one that defaults."

Too stupid to live is the term of art.

What planet are you from, seriously? 77% repayment means 23% loss, which works out to a staggering -95.7% API if your average contract is one month (if we use a closer-to-reality 3 weeks, it's -99% API). One Bitcoin "invested" on your scamplatform today will yield something on the order of 0.01 BTC on December 21, 2013, on average. Even miner bonds are better bang for the buck.

Learn 2 math. Preferably before you purport to offer Bitcoin services.

What a difference a couple of years make...

What difference do a couple of years make ? Not two, not twenty, not two hundred. The children come to school and four years later they leave with four years' worth of credit, but the dandelion roots all over the courtyard have been there since before the school was built, and will remain long after the school itself leaves. They'll just never get a degree, that's all.

1. If they're using bootstrap, they're scammers. Forget about it, no discussion necessary. Also the rounded corners, large thick font, photographic-heavy visual paradigm is an excellent heuristic for identifying what to stay away from. They're not necessarily scammers, but they are necessarily idiots, and in the mid term the difference is negligible. [↩]
2. What could be a better combo than grass green, plain white, weird blue ? Other than, you know, everything. And why even do #0066cc like sane webpeople when you're going for that "baby blue that's been sick a season" nuance when there's a whole lot of #0068c0 unused ? [↩]
3. The sense it makes is that the BTCJam people are selling their webplatform on the usual premise such rounded corner - thick font - heavy on photo webplatforms are sold : free stuff! Because - you've heard it a million times by now - it will "drive adoption" at which point it will "become a market leader" at which point "it will be worth money" (not really, but it might allow the "founders" to walk out for some money). The whole thing's amply discussed elsewhere.

   In their case, the free stuff in question happens to be OPM, and so come and get sum! And dun' worry your pretty Internet consumer head about how Bitcoin's been going down lately : it will go up in the future so it is worth stealing today. Don't be like those improvident thieves that steal actually valuable things - be the ant rather than the grasshopper and steal while shit's still not-as-valuable! [↩]

4. From back in the day I was paying for a sane person to try and talk sense on that venue (they "all" hated her). She did score a few major hits, such as being the first and for a few short weeks the only to have called out Pirate for the scam he was - you should see the piles of mails and messages I got from "professional" "businessmen" about how I should fire her and how calling a scam a scam is "bad PR". Guess what ? This nonsensical approach is still the law of the land over in the VC circus. They honestly believe they will "build an industry" by "never talking negatively about others". People unqualified to wipe the floors in my shop, but also stupid enough to not realise this, run around pretending like they're CEOs and "have 20 years' experience". Here's a hint : spending 20 years being stupid does not give you any experience. That's just not how experience works. [↩]