Bitcoin Forum

I am currently in the process of making a website in which lending data can be tracked and recorded for anyone who wants to use it.  Basically you create an account and you can lend or borrow to anyone with an account there and it will record all loans automatically.  Payments will also be tracked as well using bitcoind.

Things that will be tracked for all users.
debt
total lent
completed loans
days late
total borrowed
total days with debt

I am considering implementing facebook accounts or linkedin accounts possible.  I would need a way to prevent lenders from lending to themselves on a separate account to rack up credit.  I would appreciate any ideas.

Loans will also have the option to be pegged to the USD or the BTC.  I might implement multiple currencies in the future, but that is not top priority for me.

The payments will be made through bitcoin address and will automatically be forwarded to the lenders btc address of his choosing.

Will this service be useful to anyone?  I should have it up in a week or two.  I have been working on it for months now.

[UPDATE]

I have been working on this a lot the last week.  The website does not look amazing, but I am heavily focusing on functionality.

So far I am implementing the following items to this website.
It will track all lending data for both the lender and the borrower.
debt, total debt, completed loans, days late are a few of the statistics you will see when you log into an account.

You will be able to post a loan request publicly, which will display your loan stats so lenders can browse requested loans.  The lender can click a button and take the loan.  The loan will be pulled off the page and will go into limbo for a couple hours while the lender can arrange sending payment.

The payment can be made directly to the customer where I will record the payment by accessing the blockchain data.  You can also send the payment to me which will record the payment via bitcoind and forward the money to the borrower.  This provides members with the ability to make payments completely independent of my wallet and therefore lower risk of theft.  I must have both the sender and the receiving bitcoin address before the coin is sent or the payment will not be recorded.  I can override this if both the lender and borrower contact me with payment details.

After the money is sent, the loan will become active and interest will accrue.  When member wants to pay off his loan he can send the payment directly to the lender or through my wallet, whichever they decide.  The loan will be recorded as completed and the stats for both users will be updated.

I will also implement the tru.ly api for identification verification.  If you would like to have a verified account, which will add a significant amount of trust to your account.  You can enter your full name, address, and last 4 digits of your social and your information will be verified through a government database.  This will ensure that verified users cannot just make another account after ripping somebody off.  Of course becoming verified is completely voluntary and I do understand if a majority of users opt out of this option.

If a verified user does not pay off their loan on time.  Their private data(address, full name, etc) will be provided to the lender.  This bad debt can then be sold to others who perhaps live near the member with the bad debt and can collect.

The site is not live yet, so many of these things can be altered if anyone sees any reason why they should.  Thank you for your input and long live bitcoin.

I thought about that, but it would be almost impossible to implement in way it should be done)

Please elaborate.

Yes, i very much think that this service will be useful to many including myself.

It is highly depends on internet id. But the most problem is that every bad ID can be replaced by new,clear one. So we will have good lenders and depositors. But when there is a system you can always find your own ways to get yourself good rep, then you can have a loan and dont pay it back and start over again. And when we talk about serious money there wont be almost no difficulties to get yourself new IDs. And if we use real life identifications, then it would be the same with other currencies plus scammers still may do what they do. That is the problem of system, because rules are well known.

Social account linking, maybe. I think you touched on another important point, though -- defaulters are almost always scrammers, not people who ever negotiate paying off a small portion of debt or are ever responsive again on the accounts they used to scram with.

We tried doing collaborating on publishing this info a few times before, and it always falls apart because lenders are too lazy. Two websites were previously made to try doing what the OP did, and I once made a simple collaborative Google Doc for trusted lenders - manually inserted every single loan Sen made using data from the giant IBB thread - but it all ended abandoned.

ETA: Derp. I should read the whole 1m worth of words before commenting. :x

This would be a fully automated system.  No data will be input manually other than creating accounts and passwords. 

This scamming issue certainly has crossed my mind.  I was thinking about perhaps adding a very long form where users can put as much information about themselves as they would like.  Phone number, address, facebook account, etc would be some of the information that could be provided.  This would of course all be optional.

Then it would be much easier to avoid scammers, because fake facebooks are easy to spot.  Also if you give them a call on their phone and some spanish speaking women answers you know something is not on the level...

I was also considering perhaps tracking ip addresses to particular accounts, but I would like to avoid this if possible.

These problems are not new to lending.  Credit cards are frequently stolen and that cost is something that just has to be passed on to other customers.

What if the borrower is a spanish speaking woman?

Also IP tracking won't do you any good unless you actively block TOR exit nodes and Proxies.  Even then, you'll always be a step behind.

I would appreciate any ideas for solutions to these problems.  I have ideas that would limit abuse, but certainly not eliminate it.

Found this online.  Think people would be willing to use this to verify their identity?

https://tru.ly/api/get-started

i don't think there is a way to stop this but you can definitely minimize the risks.

ask for proof of id, utility bill and a phone call with the registrant will be good.
also you part is to determinate the accuracy of the data
after this dates are completed the lender will see a trustworthy borrower.

and also a privacy policy and term of use to have them signed will be important.

Although this kinda goes against his whole automated goal.  All those verifications need to be done manually.

sure, you can always give 2 3 hours a day for this kind of verifications. i like your idea and you should definitely built it

Once again, while there is a system of verification it will be easy to pass it. Or it will so difficult and personalized that no one will wont to pass it. And you`ll have to be very high trusted to get such info, right now this is only possible to be done by pirate or glbse.

Well if any manual verification needs to be done, I would expect the lender to do his due diligence.  I do not want cry babies calling me wanting their coins back because a member was "verified".  Just because his identity is verified does not mean that he will pay up.  I especially do not want to take the heat after spending my precious time verifying the identity of members.

info are easy to get this days over the internet but a pic taken with your name beside your ID or utility it's not easy to make. and the best thing to do is to have them verified manually.

bro you are just a simple website owner you do not make guarantees for any of the borrowers keep that in mind. you will also have term of use and all sorts of pages explaining this. but to keep your website as much as clean it's your business doing this. i didn't hear paypal complaining about stolen accounts and give money to people back. also the lender will have the last word so it's entirely up to him.

Sub for interest.

Anything linked to facebook and I'm out (as would a lot of other people).  I hate it as much as Apple (happily and irrationally) and now seeing iJunk is making farcebook part of the OS, I have even more reason to avoid over-priced POS.

As an observation, you might have a look through the lending/market-place sub-forums to see how much business is actually being done.  There are a few, but not heaps.  Also, funnelling funds through your website makes another point of failure and/or attack.  I would need to trust you pretty thoroughly before putting any appreciable volume of business through your site.

And for ignoring at the bottom of the post:
Anything linked to facebook and I'm out (as would a lot of other people).  I hate it as much as Apple (happily and irrationally) and now seeing iJunk is making farcebook part of the OS, I have even more reason to avoid over-priced iPOS.

Yes I do agree that Facebook is not an idea solution.  It would not be required that you sign up for facebook, but could add to your credibility.  All personal information would be entirely voluntary.  And as far as funneling coin through my site... I would really want to avoid this possible by adding bitcoin-abe database through mysql so that I can still record payments just by running a sql query on the blockchain.

I feel like there will be many problems with payments not being recorded properly.  I would need to know the bitcoin address before a payment is made and not after.  Because someone could simply just look up the blockchain transactions and pull a bitcoin address that has made a payment there and pawn it off as their own.  Also, the bitcoin address would most likely change often and would require constant updates from the end user...

Should I implement one? or both? Any ideas?  Doing both would be easy enough and only require an extra day or two of code.

Customers might be in short supply, but I would also like to render lending services on this site as well.  So if nobody wants to use this tool, at least I could...

Addresses for users and payment/loans would (should) be set up in advance.  I run a dedicated receiving address for every customer so I know where incoming coins are from and so I can track them.

Anyway - sub'd for interest.

bombartier357 i suggest you put your ass to work and after the project it's almost done we can give alternative suggestions.
 

Right, the addresses would be set up in advance if they were paying through my hot wallet.  If I were to integrate bitcoin-abe as well, then customers would actually be using their addresses on their own wallets.  These addresses would(should) be set up in advance, but I also want most bitcoin users to be able to make payments easily and reduce human error.  Under the circumstances that they do not update their bitcoin address on my website and they make a payment to the lender; because their address is not properly updated the payment would not be recorded.  I hope I explained that well enough.

Most of the code is set up, but there are still a few large parts of the code that need to be implemented.  Mainly issues that requires input from possible users.  When I get the beta up and running I will give the community a shout so they can help me work out the bugs if they wish to do so.

bump

put it up, let's go for a ride and will go from there.

I agree if you got a good code base ready, release it with a beta tag on it and lets have fun.

One idea I was thinking about the other day with regards to reputation systems would be the idea of recording ratings and other information as micro transactions (with the numeric amounts actually being encoded information) in the block chain (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=87339.0).

The point being that then your DB doesn't need to be trusted/relied upon to hold rating (or other) information.

This is an interesting idea.  Do do how a proposed system for encoding this information?  I feel as if there could be limitations to this method of recording data.

Personally I think that would be unnecessarily complex. The important thing is to make certain to keep all emails/passwords secure and in very limited (and trusted) hands. Also, creating a credit rating system that makes sense (unlike the crap used on the fraudulent world financial markets) would be a big step toward better lending reliability. If all borrowers are required to create an account, they could be tracked pretty easily and lenders can get a good idea of who is higher or lower risk.

Yes I agree 100%.  The only person that would have access to my server would be me.  I would of course disclose my identity for obvious reasons.

Do you have any experience with this type of security?  I would love some insight on the issue.  I have a few ideas, but I would rather not discuss them openly on the forum.  Feel free to shoot me a line.

kyle.emmet.austin@gmail.com

Actually the system is really quite simple (but maybe I didn't express that so well in the other thread).

The point is that any trust system where the data is *privately* held automatically now has a fundamental weakness (this is after all why we like the fact that Bitcoin is the way it is).

Yes I understand your concerns, but do you have a plan to solve this problem?  I cannot think of a way to add this to the block chain effectively.

The idea is to use specific addresses (owned by for example yourself) for receiving and sending ratings as two tx's. The first between the "rater" and yourself (which as explained in the other thread includes a CRC in the amount so where it is later sent can be verified) and the second between yourself and the "rated" party.

What about tx fees?  Wouldn't that increase block chain size?

Of course tx fees need to be taken into account and there is always the issue of increasing the blockchain size (although I think Satoshi Dice has done more in that regards than this probably would initially).

I did propose that perhaps an alt-chain (maybe RTC = rate coins) could be something to consider.

For sure this is not going to be a trivial exercise but I do think that the benefit of a low (towards zero) trust mechanism has much more chance of widespread acceptance than any other method (and would be happy to contribute towards such an effort if others were interested to pursue it).