Bitcoin Forum

Please raise the bar for posting in Lending/Goods/Currency Exchange.

Maybe even prohibit exchange deals in Newbies.

Especially Lending. Apparently the newest wave of scammers have graduated and now looking for potential sheeple.

Add an interstitial warning page for those sections of the forum and require the user to type, "I understand that someone will attempt to attempt to scam me here." in a confirmation text box before proceeding.

I like that, there should be a TOS pop up when you register that says. Yadda yadda I must treat every transaction a possible scam.
It should have to be read and and agreed to once every 30 days.

Why not both?  Why not a prohibition on exchange deals in Newbies and tougher criteria for starting threads in Lending/Goods/Currency Exchange?

I posted a topic about that here over a month ago, but never got any kind of official response.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=142243.0

+1 This world is infested with scammers!  :D We've seen some great ones come and go here, and will see even more for sure...

Definitely, the Newbie section moderators should step on the blatant scams and rip-offs in there, as soon as they come up.

However, i think the experienced members are also ignoring clear attempts to scam or at least mislead and rip-off the inexperienced and the naive.

One might say that it's Natural Selection at work, but that's what gives this forum and bitcoin its negative reputation as Scam Central.

Most of us know a scam when we see it, but very few of us try to step on it, or even point it out in the scam threads. We can't expect the moderators to pull all the load on this issue...

I'd guess that they're just 1 or two people, too.

Yes, I think that's so too. They create accounts with variable amounts of scammishness, and try to divert potential investors to 1-2 of their accounts.

Who ever reads or obeys terms and conditions? I certainly don't, they're just there either as a veiled threat most of the time or to absolve the people who wrote it of any responsibility. We can't police the internet and protect people from their own stupidity, use the ignore list, if you're thick enough to actually buy into one of these obvious scams then I'm just going to laugh at you I'm afraid.

I honestly wish people would stop coming along trying to change the Bitcoin communities and Bitcoin itself so it suits their visions, if you don't like how things are done here, make your own alternate currency and site.

How about a list of trusted people vs scammesr. List of scammers is useless because they can make another account.

A master list would also be exploitable. How about integrating web of trust (like bitcoin-otc) into Bitcointalk?

Look how many previously trusted community members now wear the scammer tag.  People need to stop being so open-minded that their brains fall out.  This community vouching for the trustworthiness of its members hasn't worked too well so far and there's no reason to believe it would in the future.  It's a role/responsibility it should emphatically reject.

It would be up to each user to establish who they trust the judgment of, was my point. If you made a "voting" system or central location, all it would do is encourage scammers to game that system.
Of course, there's no perfect defense against confidence scammers, but I like a web of trust approach better than an easily gamed central "scammer list". Hopefully it would take enough work to build trust, through many transactions, that even if the guy runs off with people's money or gets hit by a bus tomorrow and never logs on again, he would have provided more net value to the economy than he takes out.

Can we get rid of kijimo's confidence loans while we're at it? He and his poker friends are spamming the lending forum with their crapshoots. They're not even dealing in BTC.

I posted this elsewhere, I had this thread in mind when I typed it up so thought I'd crosspost it here, it's mostly relevant and I don't want to respond here with a separate post saying pretty much the same thing.

(In response to several angry pms, I decided afterwards to build on it a bit, remove the quotes for readability/privacy, and post it publicly)
I don't do scammer tags dude, that's admins, not mods. I can request one, but I still have to meet the same burden of evidence as everyone else does, including you. I can't do anything you can't easily do yourself. Theymos has full and complete discretion regarding scammer tags, this is his forum. He also has a lot of duties and little time on his hands. We've tried outsourcing it, there's even a thread about it, but nobody really wants to do it in the end, especially for free. How much do you value your time? How long did it take you to decide to send that guy 500 dollars? How long do you expect someone else to spend deciding whether this guy should receive a scammer tag or not? How much do you think that guys time is worth?

What kind of deterrent would you suggest? What do you think will stop predators like this? They surround any forum related to money, it isn't just this forum, it's just more rampant because of no chargebacks, no authority to turn to, and the lack of personal responsibility so many have when it comes to their money because they are so used to depending on others (credit card companies or the bank for example). So they run to the forum in order to post a thread, get angry and try to pin all their problem on the forums and the big evil people who just won't give that totally anonymous guy the scammer tag he so richly deserves so he can be appropriately punished  ::).  

What I said was it's pretty much a waste of time to give him a tag. I don't think it's a complete waste of time to give him a scammer tag, and no that isn't "policy". If he did scam you he probably needs a scammer tag to save the next sucker, but he can easily make another account (IP's are easily faked or hidden) and those same dupes you linked me earlier that are in the process of perhaps getting scammed are just gonna get scammed anyway. They are sending money to a fresh account with 13 posts. It being a month old means nothing, the guy has probably scamming here for longer than a month if you just stop and think about the situation objectively. Any forum revolving around money is going to have scammers in the wings, and this one is no exception, probably even more so due to how easy bitcoin is to "play" with and the fact that the people who tend to get scammed via paypal/moneypak are young people wanting to buy drugs from wherever.

People who get scammed so easily are hurting this forum by bringing more and more scammers, and I hate seeing naive people like you (I really do hate it, that's why I ignore this subforum mostly, my time is better spent elsewhere)  lose their money to predators who scam, get tags, and just abandon the account and start again. I wouldn't be surprised if that guy has 50 accounts running through proxies, just scamming people left and right, just queueing up new accounts to replace the ones that get a tag. Banning won't help either.

I may be harsh, I may be a dick, but I won't apologize for it and I won't delete my posts. I love bitcoin and this forum (many hours of entertainment to be had here) and I hate seeing what it's turned into with how gullible people are and how easy it is to get scammed, and how rampant scamming is with a currency of this sort that has no failsafes.

It's actually been quite illuminating, I don't even know if people are ready for something like bitcoin. I've never been of the opinion that it will take over world trade and cause the end of the banks or whatever, it's just not very convenient for the kind of transactions I do daily. Maybe it will be in the future, maybe someone will build on it and use bitcoin and the blockchain as a backbone to do something really awesome. It's still useful, but it doesn't need to do everything to be useful and valuable.


Edit: Actually you know what, in the end I agree with you, we should just remove the scammer tag system. People depend on it too much and use it as justification to be dumb assholes and send money to anonymous people on the internet (who couldn't possibly be lying), then blame the forum for their dumb asshole mistakes so they don't have to admit they're a dumb asshole.  

Edit part deux:

Here, I'll one up you and quote the most important post in that thread. This whole post can be directed at you as well.


TLDR
People need to take more personal responsibility and stop depending on others to do things for them, and relying on scammer tags to keep you and your money safe is, in the end, just dumb. But if you send me a pm, I'll take time out of my weekend of liquor, card games, and women to try and get this guy the scammer tag he so richly deserves and ruin his reputation forever and ever, then everything will be ok and he will never ever come back.

I may be slightly jaded  ;).

Lending should be renamed to "Give me 1 BTC and I'll send you back 1.05 BTC! kekek ^_^"

Cool. May what goes around come around to all of us! If you ever do something stupid, (which of course you never would because you are so smart and will never get old or sick) i hope the people around you just laugh at you.  :D

I think most of the time people can stop it simply by putting their opinion into the scam threads as they come across them.

We all have verbose opinions and love to type.  :D

If most people took a few seconds to identify the scam thread as they incidentally come across them by posting so in them, those threads would quickly fill with scam warnings.

Then we will have done all we can to protect our own reputations, because the scammers naturally try to mascarade as us, the non-scammers, and affect the reputation of this whole forum.

Buyer Beware

Otherwise Bitcointalk turns into the US Social System

lol :P I have done stupid things and people have laughed at me ;) It always happens both ways though, what I'm tired of though is trying to warn people who should really know better and do their research before going into something new like Bitcoin then they inevitably come here blaming other people for things they've done.

Yeah, community policing seems to be the best way to deal with it. Tomatocage does an excellent job of that.

Some people are just beyond help though. 

You can fool proof anything but a better fool will come along.

+1
If we say the mods are going to determine who is a scammer then we all need to pay .5BTC per month. That should be enough to hire 50 new mods with degrees in finance law.
The point of bitcoin is to have control over your money. That also means responsibility over it. All these new peers need to remember is...
1. Don't invest in anything you don't understand fully.

2. Don't lend or borrow bitcoins.

3. Practice high level security. If you don't understand PGP, VPN, cold storage, backups, two factor authentication, etc... Then learn before you buy coins.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that lately. I've been getting really sick of dealing with scammer cases. It probably takes up a third of my admin time, and despite being nearly useless, it's always controversial.

However, I don't know that I can just let truly obvious scammers go without scammer tags. They'd become 1000-post VIP members and rip naïve newbies apart. And I can't give scammer tags to some obvious scammers and not others. We probably need to replace scammer tags with a web of trust rating system.

Yeah it's probably time to ditch the scammer tag system, the forum has grown too large for one, or even a few people to oversee and decide all scammer accusations, especially with how mind boggling irresponsible so many people are. There are also a lot more businesses, and people want scammer tags for something that, in the end really looks to just be bad customer service (maybe, I'm undecided). The benefit of a rating system would be that it's averaged, so one bad complaint won't tarnish your record, whereas now, it technically should get you a scammer tag. Should a business be judged on a single action? I don't think it should, should be weighted.

Downside is ratings can easily be faked or bought, I'm sure someone will mention Pirate had a perfect(?) otc score, but he also didn't have a scammer tag either (and technically wasn't one at the time). 
 

How about a surety system instead of a rating system?

You can't help those how can't help themselves.

I'm for a scammer committee.  Two or three trusted member or maybe more then you have an x of y votes to apply the tag.

Some guys can be VERY aggressive.    I know I jump the gun on occasion.  But I think it would work pretty well.  I would also put the community on notice that their trades are being policed.

We would also have to define SCAMMER.

My opinion it is a person who does not uphold their end of a deal after a period of time.  The scammer thread it a place to publicly debate it and if the scammer make good the tag gets removed.

I DO NOT think welshing on a bet is scamming.  So after the whole MNW debacle, even those he's an cocky arrogant asshole, I don't think he was a scammer.  But the scammer tag did seem to silence him.  So that was a good thing.

Just my 2c

You make an excellent point in your entire post: nothing will completely stop scammers 100%. But I think that the amount of scammers can be cut down considerably, or at least a good amount in relation to the little effort it would take.

I believe the same thing you do: a lot of our scammers can/will/do simply create new accounts and try again. Changing the newbie restrictions a bit would take very little effort and would make the process of getting a scam out there more difficult. It won't stop scams, but I think it would help prevent them. Scammers would likely have to go for bigger scams to make the reward worth the effort, and bigger scams would probably have fewer takers.

If it works? Less scams for a change that could probably be done in a handful of minutes, which means less work for theymos.
If it doesn't work? It still slows down the scams even if it doesn't reduce the total amount, which would also mean less (frequent) work for theymos.


To me it's less about "more scammer tags" and more about deterring the scammers. You (understandably) don't have the time to monitor every single scam topic, so the goal should be reducing the amount or frequency of the scams that cause them.

Could you elaborate? Alternative to ratings would be nice to hear about.


Sounds good in theory, but we've tried something similar before and a few people got excited about it but it ultimately never went anywhere. That's here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90953.0) Do you think people would be willing to do that for free on an extended basis? Wouldn't want people rotating in all the time, it would get hard to find really trusted people who want to do that sooner or later. Could always require a small fee for scammer tag consideration I suppose, but that seems a little beyond the scope of what the forum should be.

I'm still in favor of just replacing the system, I'll be interested in seeing what the users think though. 


Honestly we'd rather remove the newbie restrictions, rather than make them tighter just to solve a problem that can't be solved. No matter what we do to make an account hard to get to the lending section, they'll just do it a dozen accounts at a time. Just look at the guy I was responding to. He sent 500 dollars to someone with 13 posts and a month on his account. What kind of restrictions can we place that wouldn't burden normal users too badly, yet cause someone to not want to make that kind of easy money?

Merchants and traders who want to be bonded create a 2 of 3 multisig address with the other two parties being a bond company and an escrow company and publicly advertise this balance.

In the event of a dispute, the customer can take their case to the bond company and escrow company who then can release damages paid from the bond balance.

Merchants who want to build up a good reputation have to start small, and should be advised to invest some percentage of their gross into the bond so that customers will be willing to trust them with increasingly larger amounts. When they are ready to cash out they can have the funds released after a pre-negotiated waiting period so that existing customers have time to move their business before the bond protection runs out.

Smart customers will never risk more in a trade than the bond is worth, or else will negotiate for better terms for high risk transactions.

Interesting.  Only trade with bond sellers.

Trust no one. If you do then live with the consequence.

In the immortal words of Ron White: you can't fix stupid. You're absolutely right: some people are just going to make terrible decisions like that, and we can't help them.

But we can make it more difficult for that scammer to claim another victim, and we can make it so members have less excuses when falling for obvious scams. I think both of these things can be done without a heavy burden on the community.

I think the simplest idea (which is also in my topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=142243.0)) would be putting a post requirement to access the lending subforum, which is where most of our scams originate. Putting a 150 post count requirement would increase the amount of time needed for a scammer to place his trap in that section. It would also give both scammers and legitimate members a larger pool of posts for potentials lenders to review before committing to a deal. If the scammer simply fills up his count with off-topic or short, pointless messages, a smart lender will think twice before parting with his money. Members who give their money away without doing their own research will have less of an excuse when they cry foul: 13 posts are hard to judge, but 150 will give you a good idea. Since the restriction would only affect that subforum, it would place no burden on newly registered members.

Hand-in-hand with that idea, or alternatively to it, would be placing a time restriction on the lending forum: accounts that are not older than, say, three months are not allowed to post there.

Both of those ideas would increase the time it would take a scammer to place a topic and get a victim. If he has to go through that wait for every account he creates, the "reward" he gets may not be worth the time he could have spent elsewhere. The scammer could always increase his target amount, but high-dollar scams are less likely to claim victims (especially if, with the posting requirement, the scammer has mostly useless posts).

Like you said: that scam is easy money. Quick changes like those can make it hard money. Scammers usually don't want hard money.

My topic also mentions possible changes to the newbie requirements that could help, but the balance would need to be in making reasonable restrictions that help prevent scams without burdening the community.

EDIT: Another good thing, I think, about these changes is how simple it would be to implement them. I've never been the admin of a forum, but I would think it'd be something like changing a setting on the forum control panel. It would, at the least, result in less work for theymos and the mods to take care of.

More specifically, only trade with bonded sellers.

If you've ever dealt with contractors or tradesmen this comes up from time to time. If the person you're buying from is bonded it means that a sum of money has been set aside somewhere to pay out damages in the event of a dispute.

Now with bitcoin, you don't need to rely on the word of any specific company - the bond can be a matter of public record.

Indeed. His score was great when everything started and I'm sure his #otc ratings were a reason for people to trust him. In the end it has turned out to be pretty useless though. I mean, someone still gave him a rating of +10 in November; long after BST was dead and the cat out of the bag.
Given a number of sockpuppets any rating system can be abused to create false ratings. Not only can a scammer upvote himself, but also downvote others. Still, scammer tags do serve a purpose, especially for those with high post numbers. A newbie can be honest, but most would consider someone with an old account and lots of posts to be better.
A tag makes that account worthless. Just look at paybtc: he's ignoring everything, acts like nothing ever happened and doesn't even attempt to be helpful. He even changed his name a few times; I assume to get rid of the negative aura his old name has. Yet, he has no tag.

Agreed. Perhaps it's also good for people to get scammed, so they learn.

People constantly try to warn others in threads where likely scams are happening and get told to "stop trolling".

The scammer forum is pretty much for after the fact warnings and having glanced at the crap it's filled with now, it's become pretty much useless.

Introducing a post/time threshold for certain types of posts would increase the effort required to start trolling for victims.  I'm hesitant to use SomethingAwful as a reference point, but the requirement that you must be a member for 7  months before you can sell something on their SAMart forum helps make scammers look elsewhere for easy pickings. 

You're not going to stop scammers looking for victims.  You can only exert some measure of control over how easy it is for them to find them here.

I already foresee too many problems with that, special interests could easily get people in who could tip the decision making process in their favour, I think when this place stops being a simple community where people gather and starts pandering to certain groups as I've seen happen many times in the past I'm out of here. I'm not pointing out you individually but too many times people like you come up with these 'great' ideas that the admins and mods get harassed with until they comply, when it's finally put into action everyone leaves out of disgust and the community is empty.

A discussion board and a community should be just that, turn it into anything else to attract people who don't exist and you'll just end up in an oasis of topics that date back to several years ago :P

Another good solution would be to force everyone to agree on an arbitrator with their trading partner before trading. Then whenever someone claims that they were scammed, the arbitrator would decide who gets a scammer tag. I'm not sure if I could easily force everyone to do this, though, since transactions are almost always finalized via PMs.

I was one of the persons who gave Pirate a +10 rating, along with a sarcastic comment, after the scheme collapsed. Just to show how useless the system was. Because the ratings were the main reason I trusted in him... ...the ratings and how everybody around here touted the BTC-otc ratings as something to be taken into account when dealing with other users.

So sort of... obligatory escrow? Or would the arbitrator only decide about the scammer tag? It would be interesting if the trusted arbitrator also escrowed the deals, I'm sure a hell of a lot less people would get scammed/ With so many deals going on on the forum how many arbitrators would there need to be? What compensation would they get? How would they be chosen?
I think the idead is interesting but worth discussing first.

Biggest problem I foresee I... trust.
We had quite a few legitimately reputable members turn scammers, how could we trust arbitrators?

That's what I was thinking, though they could also escrow.


"We" wouldn't need to. The traders themselves would decide who to trust.

That or make it so that you need to hit a post count (200 should be good) or donate an amount of bitcoins before you are even aloud to post in lending never mind make a thread but it would have to be a high amount to put of scammers.

I don't want to use any post count limits because they'll incentivize people to post garbage.

If they are posting garbage though you will know they will be a high risk of being a scammer.

I'm not entirely against that idea, but the point of arbitration in the real world is that it's legally binding.  A lot of scams here are for relatively trivial amounts and arbitration seems like an absurd amount of effort for the mere awarding of a tag (which most scammers don't care about anyway).  It seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity and expense for transactions which aren't high value.

I'm also somewhat against this forum being the policeman for the entire Bitcoin economy.  We've recently seen a thread in the scam forum regarding a BTCJam transaction and I'm not sure that this forum should consider awarding tags on the basis of activity which hasn't taken place here.

If the scammer tag process is too laborious, it's not much use - it warns people after the horse has well and truly bolted.  But I also think a trend is developing where people make little effort to actually resolve issues before posting scammer accusation threads and expect to have the tag apllied on the basis of little or no evidence.

If we're going to make any changes to the way we deal with scammers in this forum, I think we need to review the whole thing and decide whether the forum should play any active role in policing scammers and to what extent. 

It's been suggested before, and maybe it's time to revisit the idea of splitting Marketplace off from the forums proper.

Pirate had a large mouth, so did a lot of other scammers. They brag, boast, and flap their feather wings, because of their big egos. This is a very large big red sign. Everybody should learn that. Not saying that the attention-seeking loud talkers are all scammers, but it seems like they very frequently is. At the same time, a lot of people get duped by all that hoopla. I hope it serves as an education for those who got fooled, and that they're more careful in the future.

The bitcoin-otc system is not foolproof, and I would not trust it blindly, I would do my own investigations before dealing with somebody, and I have turned down trades with users that have good ratings, simply because they could not provide some reasonable amount of information that I was asking for. I don't care whether they think I was just too paranoid, or whether they were scammers and were afraid of getting caught with their pants down. Either way, the end result was that I wasn't scammed.

No matter how much of a great trust rating Pirate had, I would've never done any deals with him, because I do not trust people that are jumping up and down, and handwaiving with excitement constantly.

Flamboyant egomaniacs are to be avoided at all costs.

Just put in the inbox of everyone that has less than 200 posts a big large sign with red letters that says: "Assume that everybody that wants to trade with you is a scammer wanting to steal your money, and be very careful. If in doubt, post in the forum and have the opinion of more experienced users."

But again - not sure to what extent we should protect newcomers ?

Hehe, should it be severed off and be put on bitcoinsesspit.org ?

Bitcoindrama is already registered - perhaps we should send it there.  BTCJam should probably be renamed BTCesspit, though.

OTC is kind of useless, look with what I've been living with from the times of bitcoinica...

http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=paraipan

Never traded with them but still got the neg votes. Can't even talk on bitcoin-otc for this reason :/

Why? They removed your voice because of the negative votes?
I still see an overall positive rating.

From what I got, from nanotube himself, the channel bot doesn't give voice to people who have a negative rating on a direct path to its "master", nanotube, so "pigeons" or "vragnaroda" have direct ratings with him. Also he said he can't remove the votes not to tamper the rating system, and no positive vote from him either, so I'm effectively muted on the OTC.

This happened only for speaking out loud on Bitcoinica and warning people 1 month before they went down.

How many people associated with GLBSE also have positive OTC ratings?

Pits me, none I hope.

I thought this was already the case?

I stayed away from Pirate for a long time, but at some point I decided to jump on too. Why? Mainly because of his #otc ratings and how this was supposed to help to protect one from scammers. Then many reported that they got paid, so whatever he did appeared to work to some degree. Of course there were warnings that it was probably a scam, but most of those ran similar projects so it wasn't easy to determine if those warnings were just part of a mud-fight. Also don't forget that Pirate met with a few of his investors face to face. Also I'm not sure if I was scammed by Pirate or paybtc.
Some might say that the promises were too good to be true; but look at the btc price development: from less than cents to around $45 now in 2+ years. People laughed at bitcoin at the beginning and said it's just a scam; but look at it right now.

The current scammer tag doesn't protect against long cons either. I think a WoT system is still better in the end. There may be fake ratings, but there are still signs usually pointing to that. A bunch of ratings on a new account from new accounts isn't gonna mean much, and they will have to use new accounts since accounts that rate a lot of people who turn out to be scammers won't be as trusted as others.

WoT will empower the users to make more informed decisions about scammers, but I think we should retain the warning about ponzi schemes as well. A ponzi or pyramid scheme will have almost purely satisfied customers until the day that it collapses; there might be complaints about technical or customer service issues, but everyone who join will earn money on it until the last guys left holding the bag. The scheme will thus have a positive rating on WoT until the day it collapses.

Agreed.

I really hate the amount of scammers here.
Am I wrong for assuming that it makes it harder for legitimate people to get loans?
A solution to this could be requiring ID checks.
Scammers will be only able to scam once.

MAC

Whats worse than losing a few coins t a scam ?

Handing over all your ID and now a scammer has it.

Im surprised people like Nefario who got peoples Id for glbse and btcjam havent taken out massive  credit card debts on behalf of people who hand that over.

Trendon Shavers aka Pirate is probably the guy on which we have the most information around here.


Don't forget he was part-owner of GPUMax, a start-up similar to what Coinlab is trying to do. GPUMax was dominant in the mining market back then.

Shavers, even with his information, reputation and business on the line, still went on with the scam. It's just to show that some scammers are ready to lose a lot for their scam. There's no secret recipe against scammers, some will still be able to break the system. It's not a matter of "let's do that and problem solved". It's a job of constant vigilance and sharing of information.

I cannot even understand why are the forum owners allowing people to lend or borrow money? Not to mention the suspicious BTC funds appearing.

If these activities were banned then it would raise the quality of the forums surely.

I would like to add that the people who gets scammed on a forum partly deserves what she/he got. It's not wise to lend money on the internets or believe anything what a stranger offers (remember what your mom said about things like this) :P

Lending and borrowing money is a legal activity and Bitcoin is used as a currency. How are you supposed to develop an economy if you ban simple trading?

As for blaming the victims, it may be satisfying for the ego of some people and help them feel better about themselves, but it doesn't do anything productive. An economy is built on trust, and scammers simply destroy that trust/economy. We're looking to make the economy better, not make it worse.

The scammer saturation on this forum is good enough.  You absolutely need scammers to show people who not to deal with.  Some people are going to lose money, and it's going to hurt, and they will learn from the mistake and others who witness it happen will learn from that person's mistake.  It locks in who to trust, and who not to trust.  Thus, trust is formed, and locks out the scammers.  If nobody on this forum scammed, it would be INCREDIBLY easy for a potential scammer to get away with it.  And it has happened.  And people attempt to scam that way, and are unsuccessful.

No, lending and borrowing is not necessary. If you don't have money to do something then you shouldn't play with others funds. If you have a significant (worthwhile) project which needs funding then there are other ways to fund it (even with BTC).

The bitcoin economy is not equal to people doing shady businesses on this forum.

I understand what your message is believe it or not, but I have to disagree. Lending is necessary for the life of any economy. Think about what would happen if no one was allowed to borrow anything from anyone else. It gets out of hand if not managed responsibly (like most things), but borrowing isn't bad. Go read about the differences between"good debt" and "bad debt".

On a side note, lending BTC should only be done by people who are long BTC.

It's probably worth pointing out that we're likely to see more people default on BTC loans as the price keeps rising. 

I would definitely like to see something like this happen.