Originally posted on 08/05/2016:

Do lenders know the risk they're taking when they lend, given SBR's policy of non-intervention? Sure they do...but that doesn't change the fact that stiffs are still bad members of the community. If SBR is concerned about the quality of the community, as many private organizations are, it's in their best interests to punish or remove bad members. SBR bans people who take other actions, so they clearly are interested in taking action to maintain standards in membership; the inescapable conclusion is that they don't consider a broken points agreement to be as important as these other, ban-worthy actions. The real question though: should they believe otherwise?

While I consider broken repayment promises to be more significant than incendiary statements which routinely get people banned, I can understand that SBR's perspective is different, and they care about different things. From a marketing perspective, outsiders aren't likely to make a snap judgement on broken loan repayments, or even care very much; derogatory language is much more toxic to their brand to the casual observer who considers joining the community.

Could SBR add some code to allow people to enter website-enforced loans? Sure they could, and it would arguably be a neat service to offer members...but being a community of degenerates, making lending less risky would probably encourage folks to leverage their future betpoint earnings in a hurry. Compared to slowly doling them out over the membership period, that would probably lead to most people losing their years worth of points in well under a week, and not coming back to the site for a year if at all.

All that aside, if SBR tries to regulate points, they run the very real risk of having the US determine that betpoints are a consideration which satisfies the legal definition of gambling, and trying to take action to shut down SBR for running a US-facing gambling operation. It's hypocritical and violates all sorts of international trade agreements, but the US has repeatedly shown it doesn't care and will do it anyways.

Weigh the benefits (a small amount of already-paying members would be more satisfied but won't provide any more profit) to the downsides (added coding/personnel cost for enforcement, negatively impacting traffic and associated appeal to business partners, very real threat of US action), and it's no surprise SBR won't take action on bad betpoint debts. If I was in their shoes I'd like to think I'd regulate it with some changes to mitigate the downsides, but it would still probably be a bad business decision. Grumble about it as I do occasionally, I don't think SBR's stance is unwise.