I'm personally against P2P lending on the bitcoin world unless It's done on the forums, the other sites tend to ask you for linking your Social media account, Github, PayPal, Coinbase accounts, In addition to providing ID, proof of income etc...
I know they are trying to reduce the risks of lenders being scammed but this is not working because anyone could buy those accounts online and link them, documents can also be bought and faked so If you don't really want to get scammed, I don't suggest using them.
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I think you're right about people buying accounts, but I don't think that's useless to guard against scams. It depends on the type of account. Higher quality accounts (very long history, etc) probably are not on the market by some users for any price. If that's combined with other factors like proper ID etc. this can give a clue to a person's trustworthiness. Our entire business model is based on this. We believe a majority of people are not scammers, so we only need to weed out the few bad ones that come by.
To put our model to the test I'll soon be making a post for small loans which hopefully the community finds helpful.
I agree. Its now pointless to ask for IDs and other documents. Thats what have happened on btcjam. People would submit fake documents and once they default, it been shown that btcjam failed to really validate the user, and who knows what other sites are doing to validate and verify such information once the lenders are given the borrower information. There are ways to improve such services but thats a different story and probably never will be done due to it being time consuming.
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Properly validating users is exactly what we plan to do!
There may be ways to reduce the time required.