I'm a long-time observer of microfinance who is an active participant in most of the lending/crowdfunding platforms out there, including yours. I'm also a hacker, and am excited about the way that tech is being used in microfinance and crowdfunding.  I think this stuff could have a big impact on the developing world, which is why I started this blog last month.  I'm slowly working my way through the topics listed here, some of which I hope will be of interest to HN readers:

http://modernmicrocredit.blogspot.com/2014/03/modern-microcr...

Zidisha just happened to be the first topic I started with.  My next article is going to be about revenue models in crowdfunding.  Some companies are using some dark design patterns in their revenue models, and I plan to cover that as well:

http://modernmicrocredit.blogspot.com/2014/04/revenue-models...

As I mention in the introduction to my article, I wasn't planning on writing a followup on Zidisha.  But then you responded to my last article by dramatically lowering your interest rates.  So I wrote a followup covering what that meant for lenders.

Like I said in the article, Zidisha shows a lot of promise, and I very much want the concept to succeed. But to do that, I think you need to start being more transparent about the problem you have with high loan loss rates.   I would love to see a long response from you regarding the article. I'd be happy to publish your response in the comments of my article, or even in the article itself.  If you have any corrections, I'd be glad to publish those as well.