Loan me a comment and Prosper
I’m fairly excited about peer to peer loan ideas emerging. Launched this past Sunday Feb 5th, the basic idea behind Prosper, Inc., at prosper.com, I expect will eventually be huge business. Individuals may share the risk of funding their peers’ loans of up to $25,000, in chunks as low as $50 per person. Of course you may also ask for a loan from your peers and allow them to bid on the ability and rate at which to lend you money. CEO of Prosper is Chris Larson, the cofounder, in 1996, of the successful E-Loan, now owned by the Puerto Rican banking group Popular, Inc.
I’ll be watching the discussion forums to guage initial activity, currently very low. I expect and hope that some mad ideas will be funded well below market interest rates. Best yet, $2,700 for ‘
Wardrobe for work‘, already fully funded at 8% by 11 different lenders. What a fascinating new tool.
See also — writeup on the Prosper launch at TechCrunch, the more established zopa.com ( from London ), individual to small buisness in developing economies at kiva.org, the group fundraising focus at fundable.org, the sourceforge/pgp attempt at Ripple, and the article on free banking at wikipedia.
I installed wordpress 2.0.1! My first upgrade since 1.5, the improvements are immediate. After removing the 15,000+ spam comments which had accumulated, new spam appears to be effectively blocked (~100 in 24 hours) thanks to the newly implemented akismet. Their stats currently claim that 82% of all comments are spam!
As a result, I’ve re-styled and re-enabled all comments on the blog! They should work great and be spam-free … for now!
February 17th, 2006 at 16:32
P2P loans, huh? Interesting idea if it legitimately pans out - could easily be turned into a pyramid scam, though; or taken advantage of by less-than-honest people.
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I recently installed WP 2.x, too, and I really like the admin interface in addition to all the nice security features :-) All that and it’s open source… What a cool time to be alive!
February 21st, 2006 at 11:03
I ended up pulling my $50 back before lending it on prosper — money is just too tight right now. Nonetheless, I like their model quite a bit. Everything is reported through Experion including defaults — so the risk of affecting one’s credit is real. I hope to see a comparison of loan default rates from services like this out a few months.
If you are even the slightest bit interested in helping with the wordpress docs, come stop by codex and lend a hand!