Intro Post: Passionate about an inherently stupid idea.

I have been frustrated by the results of my last Capstone paper: 12 pages of research into charitable loans; reading books on microlending and online charities, only to find that sites like Kiva and whatnot have already accomplished a set of similar aims.

Stuck in a rut, I'm asking myself: Why should I bother going forward with a project that has already been done, and already done successfully? Contemplating a series of shifts in my Capstone focus, I'm frustrated, anxious, nauseous. I don't want to do it.

But then I remember something: The fundamentals of something like Kiva is not the history of lending or anything to do with "disintermediation." The principle of Kiva and the Grameen bank are something else entirely: The notion of trust.

Trust does have a series of risks involved, of course. And you can see it on display in the current financial crisis: Banks are failing, and consumers are avoiding credit; Trust is gone. With Grameen, the bank's early days were plagued with the concept that the poorer people would never pay money back; that the risk was too high. The reason Grameen is revolutionary is partly because of it's model, but also because of the risk it was willing to take: It bet the business on the notion of Trust.

Over on Reddit, there's a community called Trust; the notion is simple: You send money to someone, and you trust them to send the money to someone else. It's not arranged, it's not charity, you just find a random address and send it money and a message to pass it along.

It's idealistic. It's naive. It's inherently stupid. But why? Because of the risk; because of our nagging sense of pessimism; because we know, cynics that we are, that we are probably going to lose money to someone who doesn't need it.

So: I want to simplify something like Grameen. We don't need a regulatory system. We don't need a non-profit organization monitoring the system. We need a site where people can ask for money if they need it and donate money if they feel like it. Leave the rest untouched.

The catch is the captcha. The community has to stay small. So to ask for money, you have to give money. That is: Anyone can look at anything on the site, but to post, you have to give someone something first. After that, you're trusted. It kills spam and it builds trust all in one swoop.

It's stupid; it's blatantly naive. But it's also very simple. It also builds a mountain on top of one of Mike Scott's criticisms of my earlier project - that no one wants to lend money to friends. OK, so don't. Give money away. To strangers.

Totally stupid. But totally possible.