Idea related to peer-to-peer lending, and to increase returns on investment and decrease borrowing costs

Streamline the process of lending between users heavily invested in an internet community

One problem with P2P lending is the problem of scammers, dishonest people, and general "Parfit's Hitchhiker non-payers". However, if you have been involved in a forum or internet community, then you've built up considerable "community capital". That investment helps to establish credit among the community members, but not with formal banks. So if you could put up your community reputation/karma as collateral for the loan, you could provide stronger evidence of willingness to repay the loan, and of costs you would suffer from not doing so.

The role of the entrepreneur here would be to make it easy for intra-forum lending to happen, in exchange for some kind of fee. Services would include:

• Administering the karma-reductions/deadbeat labeling
• Providing pre-made, time-tested contract formats
• Acting as certificate authority for digital signing of agreements
• Having network of local people who can take the time to pursue legal action if someone wants to go that route.
• Mediation and verification that payments happened

If you can provide a way to ensure payment through these community mechanisms, you would allow borrowers to pay a much lower rate than credit cards would charge, and lenders to get much higher returns than the market allows. (Incidentally, I recently just made such a loan to someone I had known for ten years only through internet forums, and I just got his final repayment.)

Edit: tl;dr: Basically, an internet karma pawn shop (although it's crucial that people not see it as simply a way of cashing in karma)