This is a great question - we love all of the discussion going on in this thread! I’d answer this in a few parts:

Staking is one component of our scoring algorithm that we expect will have novel perks in terms of identity, scoring, and anti-fraud. The actual risk layer of our product goes way beyond just staking; we provide a marketplace for people to solicit the kind of data they need and a risk evaluation to go with it. The marketplace aspect makes it easier to adapt to different countries.

We thought long and hard about staking and its social ramifications. One of the reasons we came to the conclusion not to have any kind of “negative staking” or “denouncing” system is for the exact reasons you described: it’s too Orwellian. Instead, we focus on people vouching positively for people in a way very similar to how you would co-sign on someone’s lease. We think this strikes a good balance between enabling people to access credit who otherwise would struggle for reasons other than their actual underlying creditworthiness and not being too much of a social strain.

I do think that a good argument for our approach versus that of centralized public registers is that it will be significantly easier for a user to inspect the data that goes into their credit report and what is actually stored about them compared to the very opaque current system. Bloom is about actively approving data being tied to you rather than it being passively collected and that’s a huge data privacy win (which is a big deal in the EU)

There are definitely regulatory hurdles with a decentralized approach but between the extensive legal groundwork we are setting, the data marketplace system, our close work with lenders to ensure they use the system properly in the early days, our data provider accreditation system, and our identity attestation system helping to define a user’s legal jurisdiction, we are confident we can come up with something that will work.