Many lenders use credit reports from the agencies (which are much more detailed than just a number), then use their own scoring system.

Unfortunately, some of the time (especially with credit card companies), they use the most idiotic, infuriating method humanly possible, where they offer loans, benefits, interest rates, and credit lines based on your LOWEST-scoring portion of your credit report. -So you could have otherwise perfect credit - say a house and car on loan, then three credit cards, and because you only have five (which seems like too many to me) credit accounts open or maybe only a five year history on your longest-running credit card (my credit score was devastated a couple years ago when a bank bought a credit card debt on my name for 14 years from another bank, which credit agencies then considered a new account which really sucked because my second-oldest account is only three years old), they'll try to insist (and since this is generally automated, give as a non-negotiable option) you're either ineligible entirely or that you need to pay a higher interest rate with more restrictions and a reduced line of credit.

It'd be nice for consumers if more lenders reintroduced human judgment rather than relying on algorithms and automated contract generators, but that's just not going to happen. As an aside, one of the best things you can do for your kid's future finances (and your own if you're enough of a doormat to co-sign for them when they're an adult), only because we have these stupid automated systems, is to add them to a couple or few (or ten+ if you're feeling really generous) credit cards, leave them on them until you die, and never tell them about it (though they'll see in the credit report, I suppose). You can screw them over that way, too, though - but it also gives them a lot of options for manipulating which debt "they" hold once they reach adulthood. They can drop their name off certain cards so they achieve ideal numbers for credit utilization, accounts open, as well as drop any cards which may otherwise be keeping their score from being ideal. For example, if something happens like in my case, where my debt was sold, they can just drop that card from their name entirely (assuming they have many other similarly-aged accounts) to increase the average age of their accounts, which would probably be favorable.

Whoa, guys -- it's Argentina, not a respected government, and it's not a "real" default. It's more like a settlement SNAFU.

As I increasingly favor long-winded anecdotes in my exceptionally old age (or perhaps under influence of Phin)... Locally, we had an issue where a neighboring county paid (issued a bond, actually) for sewage lines and hookups to our county, but two other counties informally agreed to pay for it because they were connected to that county, so all three counties could send their shit to my county. My county actually funded the bond, which is awesome because we have no money, so my shit-eating retard county issues its own bonds to make up for funding deficiencies which we all pay for because, in case I wasn't clear, my county is run by shit-eating retards... Anyway, since there was no formal agreement, the counties disputed who should pay what and the county which "put its name" on the bond ended up being in default after formally refusing to make the bond payment. It had the money, but it disputed this idea that it was supposed to pay what it formally agreed to when the other counties informally agreed to do splitsies. Long story short, my county threatened to increase the shit pumping fees on customers of all three counties to make up for the counties acting like shit, and then the shit counties finally agreed to all do even splitsies on the shit bond, so now we're all sitting pretty with a shit-eating grin.

Moral of the story: Argentina should just tell all its creditors to eat shit and get on board with the settlement agreement. US hedge fund is managed by shit-eating retards if they think not accepting payment is going to increase their earnings on an already-good deal. They had leverage, Argentina called their bluff, and now everyone comes out looking stupid. Argentina should formally renounce any liability on bonds issued to predatory morons.

Oh, what the Hell. Theymos, did you change around the altcoin subforum? I had this whole damn thing on ignore so I could actually learn about an altcoin every now and then without 100% noise, and every time things get moved around or added, I end up with these stupid shitcoin drama threads and some weird Bahrainian Meetup subforum.

Orange is the color representing Bitcoin. Anything without orange isn't Bitcoin.

Sometimes I get confused when a bank uses orange in its advertising because it's talking about payments, but then there's something about a membership fee and that they PERMIT international wires*, and it just seems weird to me that PNC is advertising some Farts Alive program rather than that they started dealing in bitcoin (evident by their orange-colored billboard).

*$15 surcharge and restrictions apply

On the other argument -- Unicode can add BTC when it feels like it, and it'll come organically with time. It's silly to be constrained by their standard when their standard is based on common usage and representations, which we set. It's like insisting bitcoins be called "dogs" because "dog" is already in Webster's, and Webster's is clearly some type of completely dead standard which never adapts to anything, so then we just spend all our time going around trying to redefine "dog" when its usage was already defined as something completely different -- and if the unicode "corruption" of BTC was not previously representative of something, it should simply be dropped and replaced by BTC.

Your question is sort of backwards. I think you meant to ask, "is there room for a cryptocurrency-run state?" I think that's very easy to answer if you just imagine a government and replace "constitution" with "protocol" in your head.

I've been looking at Cloakcoin's papers recently, and they have some very interesting theories and experiments in the line-up. For instance, if you merge parts of OneJury and OneMarket together, you have the basic assembly of a self-sustaining, democratic government where you could, for instance, require elected officials to put up collateral when they make oaths to uphold laws. Should they violate this oath, citizens could then, together, judge whether or not the official violated his oath by posting a "listing" (which would be an accusation of the offense). With the reward-punishment-reward scheme (or whatever they call it -- I already forget a bit), then, even this decision could be made "economically moral," where a fair ruling, ideally, is rewarded with money, while a false ruling - again, ideally - is punished by taking funds away from those who voted "incorrectly." Voters will want to be very careful to read the accusation and details surrounding it to ensure they make an informed decision, and it will certainly encourage widespread debate, maybe more logic-driven. If voters deem the accusation is correct and the official violated his oath, the collateral (and this is near-limitless when thinking about smart property) could be confiscated, with all assets (possibly including such things as a house or car deed/title) given out as mining rewards automatically.

OTOH, it may also encourage extreme poll bias unlike anything we've seen, where if a candidate or issue has a .7% lead in a poll, people may vote against their beliefs just for the money. It's for the same reason I'm skeptical of their implementation in decentralized listing moderation, but maybe it will be effective... Idunno - we'll see. Maybe it only works when voters are relatively uninterested/detached. It could also pressure people into not voting, since they could literally lose money for it. -But it could lead to a very logic-based, corruption-free society which operates on hard rules rather than whims and back-room deals. -And you can take these ideas to all sorts of other places with little imagination....

I search "number of police officers killed by dogs" with Google, and nothing relevant shows up. Maybe I need to try using Bing?

Snarkiness aside, I can see how a year-old dog would seriously threaten a police officer on a dog-seeking mission -- very intense, high-risk in a place like Hometown, IL. You never know when some thug is going to take advantage of a police officer's preoccupation by unloading an automatic weapon on him, so they can't be taking these risks. Also, being attacked by a dog may humiliate the police officer, and if police aren't respected/feared, it may lead to the loss of future police officers' lives because criminals will think they're soft.

I'm hoping to find some illegals who look like me. I can lease them my ID for work, and they can then live with me and pay a meager 25% tithe for house, board, and the identity lease. The IRS might get suspicious if I'm working 5 jobs at the same hours, though.

I wonder, though, why businesses don't just move plants to central America around safe communities and attract workers to these areas to meet their job demand and our demand for cheap, effective labor. Just change "Made in America" to "Packaged in America" (and many already do) -- most people probably won't even notice so long as it has that stupid American flag icon. What prevents, say, Honduras from becoming the most productive (per capita) nation in the Americas simply by nearly eliminating taxes and regulations so businesses move in? -- Uh, ignoring hurricanes for the time being...

Oh, no, it shouldn't scare you. It's given to ensure you know the program may glitch out, and you should at least have backups, but probably shouldn't let the program have control of your life savings if you're worried about a .00000000000001% chance of something catastrophic happening. It's possible there's an unknown bug which could cause this.

Armory introduced/introduces many new client-side features over Core (on top of some re-writing/changes with Armoryd). Gavin receives some praise from the community, actually, for being so conservative and not introducing all sorts of new features to Core, and this is because when you introduce more moving parts, you increase the chance for bugs, including potentially-catastrophic bugs. However, it sacrifices many innovative security, usability, and convenience features Armory and other clients have. -So you have to weigh this when making a decision. Long-term, what you really want, especially when dealing with something like Bitcoin clients where it's handling your money, is for a slow release schedule with many, many testers using dev/testing branches before they're pushed.

In game development (where users aren't putting up thousands or more dollars at stake), it's not uncommon for even small-medium sized dev teams (or their publishers) to require, say, 100-500 early testers to put in at least ~5 hours on a dev/testing branch (or complete the game) and complete some kind of survey before they push the update as a stable patch to everyone. I'm not sure even Core matches that amount of QA, though QA in a Bitcoin client is obviously monumentally more important. In development, it's often not that developers are just slow to put in all these cool new, features, but that they're waiting on testers and their surveys, then fixing anything critical which pops up, then requiring the same survey, possibly redoing that process yet again, and only THEN pushing the update out for auto-update applications (if non-critical bugs are identified by testers but where devs feel they don't outweigh the positives, you'll often see that in the "Known Issues" section of the changelog for games). Gavin has that kind of conservative mentality, I think, where relatively little is introduced, and it goes through a somewhat rigorous testing process (I imagine much less rigorous and without nearly as many testers as he'd like) to ensure to a high degree that everything's alright with it before pushing it as a stable update. In the same regard, BIPs take FOREVER.... it's like a budget bill in the US.

That's not to say Alan doesn't have the same kind of mentality, but it's pretty obvious Armory's introducing features at a much faster rate than Core while having a smaller team (both dev and testing), for better or worse (I'd argue for better, but I'm a bit impatient). I don't think Alan & team does too much with the daemon, either, which is probably where your critical bugs would appear... but I'm already way out of my knowledge zone.

You know you're dealing with a Paul supporter if they're frequently checking weather reports around election dates and praying for rain (or better, hail and snow).

Eheheh... My wife has a >$2k wedding/engagement ring (I have no idea why most people buy multiple rings) specifically made to look "subtle" (actually, I ended up calling it "industrial"). However, I have a $7 stainless steel band from Amazon (it was the second-cheapest and Prime-eligible -- the cheapest had chinese characters on it), and I'm quite fond of it. It gives me something to twiddle in my hands and have on anywhere without worry. It looks quite "normal" for a wedding band and if I lose it - no problem. Though her ring does look quite nice, I think, I believe I'm getting much more enjoyment out of my ring than she is, which she's worried about wearing anywhere or losing. TBH, though, I was hoping the jeweler who made the first ring for BTC would make me some titanium or stronger ones (he seemed very mildly offended and suggested I check out a bike shop).... It would be nice to have such strong rings on my fingers so if a tree were to fall on my hand, the rings and ground would help cushion the blow and maybe prevent me from totally losing my hand. Since it's raised from the fingers, it can prevent or significantly reduce damage from all sorts of injuries... the kitchen especially comes to mind.

Some other ideas:
Cheese-making is fairly simple (though you'll probably want to design your own cheese press unless you're cool just making really soft, quick cheeses), though there aren't many home cheese-makers and good info's scarce. It's also not particularly cost-effective if you're after the simple stuff, and a good few places have government-controlled (expensive) milk prices. It might be viable if you assume you'll work up to fancier cheeses... it's one of those cool things where there isn't a whole lot of industry experimentation except on the high-end side, so you can come up with all sorts of new stuff to try.

Ice cream is another possibility... if you have a stand mixer, there's probably an attachment available for that, though a stand mixer isn't going to let you make ANY kind of frozen ice-cream-like desert since they have to blend so fast to keep everything from freezing, while real ice cream makers can be quite expensive (though again, you can always design one yourself!). I'm not terribly fond of this one, though -- there's only so much you can do with ice cream (and similar) partially due to how much flavor's hidden when you freeze things, though it's still just as delicious. It has the same cost issue as cheese, too -- tough to make cheaper than store-bought unless you can find some eccentric dairy operators really close willing to sell you a medium-sized batch of milk and cream at a great price, though OTOH, you can make it taste/feel however you want, so you may find superior value there.

Some people enjoy beekeeping, though that's a bit more than a hobby, I'd say, especially with all the government meddling in the US right now. You need relatively unregulated land, too. My mom's a beekeeper and does all sorts of stuff with the wax, honey, and other parts, but a good bit of their business also involves contracts/grants with schools and the government. You can branch beekeeping out to just about anywhere, though, from cosmetics, to medical, to culinary, to "ranching" (breeding, I guess'd be a more appropriate word? Bee breeder? ).

ETA: @above response -- distilling can be done tabletop (police videos always show these enormous 30-gallon gas-powered stills operating in some idiot's apartment which is completely ridiculous), while wine-making literally just takes a sterilized (boiled or let to sit ~10m with a weak bleach solution [and then rinsed!]) food-grade plastic or glass container, a packet of yeast, water, and fruit concentrate. Clawhammer Supply actually sells relatively tiny, pre-assembled tabletop pot stills on Amazon which work on induction cookers (electric's definitely the way to go here, and you need ventilation). Uhhh, but you should only use that for ethanol fuel production, given you have the proper licensing, officially. You can also distill with a device as simple as a large metal pot on an electric stove or induction cooker -- you'd dump the wine in the large pot with a smaller pot floating (or otherwise above the wine) inside that (this collects the ethanol, methanol, and whatever else comes with it). On the top, you'd want to use either the large pot's lid upside down or some other round-bottom bowl flipped upside down (you can also use aluminum foil, which I've found more effective for whatever reason). You place ice and a little water in the upside down bowl or foil, and this causes the ethanol to condense, then drip down to the center of the upside down bowl or foil, where it eventually falls into the little collection bowl inside the large pot. Ethanol, methanol, and other fuels boil at a significantly lower temperature than water, so if you get the heat to around 175-190*F, you get the ethanol instead of the water. Methanol boils at around 150*F, which is why you'll want to dump the first small bit of liquid you collect (alternately, just leave the lid of foil off the top of the large pot and let everything evaporate out until you get to ~170*F). It's not particularly efficient, but you probably have the supplies already in your house except maybe a good way to measure the temperature of your mash/wine - so it's a decent way to start understanding the process (keeping in mind you absolutely shouldn't have flames around it and the area must be well-ventilated). Interestingly, though it's illegal almost everywhere, there's a surprising amount of good information out there.

Since distillation passes will progressively take out the flavors in the wine or whatever horror you may've accidentally created, you can use all sorts of gnarly stuff -- anything cheap which'll ferment. I'm fond of rice since it's the only cereal grain I can easily find in bulk around here (with cereal, you generally want to coarsely chop it, then boil it until it's just slightly cooked, though I'm grossly over-simplifying this as this process won't maximize your starch conversion). Repeating distillation passes decreases impurities (including anything giving off flavor), so no matter how awful the wine is, you can still get a decent liquor from it and then flavor that. For example, you could purchase oak chips (for "aging") off Amazon, char them, then throw them in a mason jar with your liquor to get an extremely fast-"aging" hillbilly-style whiskey. Time aging isn't actually the whole equation -- it's surface area * time, so by having your charred oak inside the alcohol, you can age a multitude faster than corporate breweries with their massive 50-gallon barrels. -Just don't forget to filter it when you're done (coffee filters work great!).

Sure. Try to live in the most energy/cost efficient way possible. If you smoke, buy an injection roller and buy online in bulk to take up a little time. If you have smokers in the family who wouldn't find it awkward, it makes for a relatively cheap (but what would be expensive to them) gift. My dad quit smoking before I made him a carton for Father's Day -- didn't know it until after I gave it to him with a bottle of wine. On that note - if you drink, fermenting is dead-simple, while distilling is a bit trickier but compared to most creation hobbies, still fairly easy to get into, and you can take it about as far as you want. Beer brewing can be difficult depending on how much you do yourself vs. just buying a couple cans at a brew shop and tossing it in a vat.

"Gamble on yourself." You can take money you'd otherwise gamble and "invest" it. Instead of having some asshole trained, licensed, and bonded professional install a solar farm for you, learn to set it up yourself, or even go so far as to make the panels yourself. If you're not in a good area for solar, wind might be available, though I'd be leery about suggesting someone set up a wind turbine with no experience (but you could still buy a kit with instructions). Welding and soldering are great skills useful in two of the three "hobbies" I've mentioned, and I'm fairly disappointed I can only barely solder, but it's something to learn later.

These three hobbies will all save you money (assuming you smoke and drink -- but I'm sure you use electricity) and give you something to do, while you're able to "gamble" by calculating the upfront costs and trying to recoup that money as fast as possible by doing the labor yourself and tweaking designs to maximize efficiency. It's not terribly complicated and you definitely don't need to be a chemist or engineer (or even go to a vocational school), but it'll give a fair sense of pride upon completion. In addition, there're plenty of people here who could help you out on them if you have questions - just toss 'em up in the Off Topic section. There are all sorts of similar things to do, if maybe you're not interested in those... working on small engines can sometimes bring in a little money (as well as save you from taking it to someone) and isn't too difficult to jump into... if you like a lot of "game" with your gambling, you could farm on an MMO, though that's about as fun as having your fingernails pulled off... Lots to do with lumber, or paving - you could create a ridiculous crushed-rock-pathed maze on your property which runs through fruiting trees, bushes, and herbs, with little sections almost like a zoo (or uhhh... what do they call them... outdoor botany zoo-things... uhh... botatorium? The name escapes me).

Some people can get fixed-rate mortgages at as low of rates as 4% for 30-years right now, which is roughly in line with "normal" annual inflation (it's been worryingly low, lately). Since land can be leased to farmers at a rate to more than cover property taxes (at least in MI this year), I'd argue it's a pretty damn good time for people with near-perfect credit to consider buying a diverse collection of cheap land near suburbs (preferably around growing factories) on credit as a mid- to long-term investment. No mountain of risk with leasing houses and which is still somewhat fungible, where you can sell parcels which've appreciated in value as needed. OTOH, a good number of banks, even, are assuming another housing crisis is imminent, but so long as the land is "fundamentally" cheap (where its value is more in utility than location or other luxury), I can't imagine it'd be nearly as much an impact, and certainly a housing bubble pop doesn't mean the value of land and houses goes down EVERYWHERE. Idunno... I'd be looking into it intensely if I thought I could get a mortgage like that.

-But yeah - in general, taking an unnecessary loan for consumer/luxury goods is a terrible idea, and even mortgages are extremely risky if all you're doing is, say, buying a house to live in where the market can easily and rapidly swing out of your favor and basically turn the place into a debtor's prison, which it seems like every generation learns too late. Business loans are maybe okay in certain circumstances, and even credit cards have major benefits if you truly know you won't get trapped, but I definitely prefer having cash on me rather than relying on debit and especially credit. Everything's just so much more quick, intuitive, and simple. I'd love it if I could pay my bills in cash -- like if I could just hand cash to the fellow filling my propane tank up, that'd be fantastic, rather than sometimes remembering to write a check when I get the mail and throw the invoice in The Drawer. -But at the same time, I don't like holding much cash just because of the theft/loss risk. Though, maybe we're not too many years off from the propane guy just printing the delivery note with a QR code, so I can just bring it inside and scan it with my phone to pay... God, that'd be so wonderful!

Just like you have to jump through hoops to make sure your cash (whether physical or digital) is safe. I've had my physical wallet stolen twice (once in my house by a plumber, even), and lost once, but I've never had my qt/Core wallet lost or stolen, and I've been using both almost as long, being fairly young. Just to get a bank account in the US, there's a long form to fill out, requiring all sorts of government info and in some cases, a fingerprint or a "vein print." Though SOME forms of cash is supposedly safe from theft in SOME cases, the hassle of recovery is, in a good few instances, more hassle than it's worth. US high schools (including where I went, in the middle of nowhere) actually have personal finance courses to teach teenagers how to use this complex system, from writing checks and securing cash to figuring out the pros and cons of different kinds of bank accounts and figuring out what the Hell TransUnion is. -But people need a bank account because it's what everyone else is using, and like switching from the imperial to metric system, it's a PitA current adults aren't interested in taking so long as the current system can continue limping along (though still a bad long-term plan to go with). -And I STILL don't understand fiat issuance fully (along with a few grads of university Quantitative courses). THAT's a complex system almost impossible to fully wrap your head around.

I'd argue what's really putting "normal" middle-aged people off to Bitcoin is just the worry about screwing something up and losing money because they just aren't very familiar with computer software in general and think this is some type of high-level sorcery only able to be understood by basement-dwelling neckbeards and MIT grads (... assuming a difference ) when it's as simple as copy-pasting one string of characters (or clicking a URI), double-checking it to make sure you/it copied the string right, then clicking the button to send it off (and hopefully, entering your password in).

I think it's really just fear of the unfamiliar, and I think that's compounded when we're really paranoid because we don't want them to lose any money on our advice, so we give them really over-the-top security measures we insist they take to keep $300 in BTC secure when they'd almost certainly never run into a security issue using a lite client without any significant changes to their general browsing/use habits. We -- and I'm using "we" really loosely here, because I mean to say "I" and assume most others are paranoid when someone comes to them for advice on what to do with their wealth -- tend to basically tell them the equivalent of keeping 2+ physical wallets for their cash, one they keep on-hand with a trivial amount in but for which they still tether to a hole cut into their body with a key they keep in another compartment of their body they had cut with a waterproof-bag which only opens with your fingerprint, and one which is kept inside mini-safes under a floorboard with a significant amount of cash (or even better, with some buried under floor boards, some kept buried in the backyard, and some stuffed into a tree) with keys kept in bank safeboxes, though you obviously don't want to keep all the keys in the same box or even the same bank -- you want to use different keys, and ideally, you'll use modular key parts, where there are maybe three key parts fit together, and you need any two keys to open one box, where these various key combinations are stored on a hidden, encrypted hard drive partition which uses a n-of-m password you've written down and given to various family members and well-trusted friends to decrypt. -And really, for a casual user with a "casual" amount of cash, the paranoid advice we give is just fucking stupid. Almost nobody keeps tens of thousands of dollars under their mattress, but it's almost like we assume everyone curious about Bitcoin's going to have 100BTC just sitting around on their Android BTC wallet, though maybe this is just from too many people in the past going full-retard and investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into something they just accumulated a cursory understanding of thirty minutes ago because they have some intuitive sense that it's the next big thing because young people are using it. Those people really ought to be waiting until they can just have their EdwardJones agent, or whoever, buy BTC (or a representative fund) for them, and maybe we're just too enthusiastic about BTC to tell them to wait for an established corporation to professionally handle (and insure) their life savings.

Caught up with PR queue. Everyone should be paid, now (two payments are still unconfirmed).

This is the most exciting altcoin I've seen to date, mostly because I never found an alternative I liked after BitMit went away. Right now, it's a very rough client (odd the Win archive doesn't bundle in OpenSSL, and then it crashed within the first 30 seconds for me trying to look at the Cloak Trade window), but I think it has a lot of potential, even if just to play some of these experiments out. As is, everything looks completely believable - that they'd work out in real world situations, that is. OTOH, there are going to be all sorts of new, "innovative" scams, and I'd argue OneMarket has a built-in p2p betting game -- "Escrow Chicken."

I'm really tempted to completely get behind this one, though... I think I'll wait until OneMarket comes out, though. ( Why is "OneMarket"  copyrighted in that preview page? -And it's showing a Windows box when devs seem to use linux almost exclusively?)

Debt collection generally isn't as harsh as the media reports it. Rarely, it involves phone calls, but almost never anything beyond that. Generally, it's just a letter sent every month or few.

I think it was earlier in this thread I may've gone on a rant about 0% credit cards. I ended up getting myself in a bit of trouble with some of them because they approve someone and have them sign a contract BEFORE they give the credit limit. In a lot of instances, I was getting garbage cards with $400 or so limits which weren't worth my time to keep up with, so I'd throw them in a drawer and never activate them. I ended up with a couple cards in "default" because they charged me some membership fee after a year I refused to pay, which then accumulated interest and late fees on monthly, which ended up with derogatory remarks on my score. A quick physical letter explaining the situation and why it's a fat load of nonsense solved it.

In many cases, where the debt's under ~$300, a credit card company or other lender will actually completely wipe the debt (even if it's legitimately accumulated), sometimes even without customer input. It's simply too small to be worth hassling the person over and burning bridges. The media sometimes does these goofy stories on someone forgetting what their co-pay was and coming up $20 short at the dentist's office, where the debt gets handed over to some obnoxious assholes who call the person up all hours of the day and at work - and it just doesn't normally happen, if at all.

I'm straying far from your question, though. BTCJam and others do generally completely overlook all this relatively great (compared to some guy giving his story and an OTC trust link) data, and when I did lending, I did, for a very short span of time, try pushing credit checks through the agencies. It can actually be done where the potential BTC lender doesn't need any government ID (SSN, home address, etc), but where the loan applicant can give that information to a trusted, major (corporate) third party which basically pulls the credit report and then sends it to the potential lender, where all the lender sees is the credit report rather than any really identifying information. I think I really put people off when I pushed it because I didn't know about these third-party agencies... people didn't seem too enthusiastic about handing their SSN over to me, so I don't have much practical experience to share on that.  -But I don't see any reason not to allow potential lendees this option if they don't have collateral or in-community reputation. Lending is basically just discovering information, compiling it, then assessing it, so any information's good information from the lender's point of view (and hopefully from the lendee's point of view).

I'm kind of torn on this because some people should be given another chance (or maybe they were wronged, or just didn't want to bother with these credit agencies if something negative's on their score), but at the same time, there's really no reason for lenders to be passing up on this kind of information, especially when the lendee and lender are often so far away from each other with really minimal information available. The BTC lending market's kind of "data isolated" right now because most neither push or pull data from existing credit agencies. Idunno what all's involved, but I suppose there's nothing preventing a fourth major credit agency from popping up which deals more in peer-to-peer issues, maybe specializing in crypto lending, and there may not be laws preventing it from doing something radical like pulling trust data from Bitcointalk or BTCJam to factor into its score.

At the end of August 5th (US Eastern time), no episode reservation will be considered valid anymore. Episode 131 and episode 132 of LTB are the last episodes to be transcribed by this project as it exists, and reservations of those episodes will be valid until August 12th (the episodes MUST be posted on LTB BEFORE you can reserve them!), but if they are reserved and not completed by August 12th, the reservation is no longer valid and may not be reserved again by anyone unless I ask someone specifically.

Hm... Is anyone able to get Soundcloud content to load today? Soundcloud the site keeps throwing "Whoa, something went wrong and it wasn't supposed to happen." at me and the applet isn't loading on the LTB pages.

ETA: Error changed to "Yikes, we were unable to process your request in time." Guess it'll be fixed soon. ETA2: There we go!

There's another issue in that a car title loan would take a long time to go through in Bitcoin time. Bitcoin ecosystem (or whatever trendy word you prefer) operates at ~10x normal speed - literally everywhere, it's expected. Even online with fiat, a car title loan is a relatively unexplored idea just because of the time required when someone can be approved for a credit card in a matter of minutes from the start of applying.

I don't think we're going to see really cool things happen again in "p2p" finance until pawn shops start really getting involved - but whichever entity involves itself, there needs to be central physical locations when dealing with government paperwork, and the person accepting the title should really be qualified to check whether or not the title's even legitimate.

Overall, though, I think it's really more of an issue with the antiquated system of property control we have, where governments keep everything on computers but people have to shuffle paper around. Smart contracts are a very reasonable solution to this and could have real-time enforcement of contract rules. For instance, if a lendee defaults, the car could give a warning, then, as soon as that lendee shuts his car engine off next (or have it done immediately if the engine's already off), lock the lendee out until he satisfies the contract requirements, with the lender having his privkey now accepted to engage the car's ignition (and unlock the doors, though I'm at risk of going off-topic, here), so repo is relatively simple assuming the lendee doesn't obliterate the car (in which case, it would maybe have to go through the horrible court process, though there are better solutions here, too).

There's nothing really preventing this from happening right now, just waiting for significant implementation, but it'll happen eventually, no doubt, and when lenders can have that REAL crypto-enforced security rather than a piece of paper representing a claim which needs to be proved to a court a thousand miles away (if even in the same country), rates can come way down. It may be a long-enough wait, though, where it'll really be our kids and grandkids accessing these new opportunities, not us so much, unless we're weird early adopters who buy a "smart contract car" literally just to test the lending opportunities out. Smart contracts have many, many more benefits than just lending, though, so again - just a waiting game.