How high is this "reasonable" number? Depending on the time frame you look at, BTCUSD goes up in annual numbers I would deem "unreasonable".
Maybe you could just calculate VIR like this:
For every atomic time unit (seconds?) calculate the following number:
Total amount of interest paid on loans (either USD or BTC) / Total amount of USD/BTC currently in active loans
Then either take the arithmethic mean or (if you're really worried about outliers) the median value of these and call it the average interest of the hour/day/week...
Lenders then can choose to either lend out at the average value of the last X hours/days/weeks or enter their own offers into the engine.
This makes sure 1 USD lent out at a few million% doesn't change interest rates that much. I still wonder if you really do a weighted average (over a few days!) how VIR can still vary that much even over 1 day. My suspicion is still that VIR itself is not factored in, only fixed rate loans (of which there might be fewer).
In general about lending:
* Grouping offers/demands makes 0 sense, if you then can't fill 'em! I click the check box next to a loan demand, some numbers get pre-filled and still have NO idea how high the real demand was, as I can't trust the interest rate displayed at all. Also even though I tried to use all information available to me, I still have to guess numbers, as "10%" means "0.0001%-10.0000%". I have no clear way to fill loan demand at the moment. Imagine placing offers with ONLY the MarketDepth chart on
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html available...
* It is hard to have this additional 3rd measurement (offer time) next to amount and APR. Maybe instead of clustering by APR, you could cluster by time? (Offers between 1-10 days, 11-31, 32-61, 62+)
* To also get a few trades on your platform going you might offer the setting that interest received from lending out BTC/USD gets automatically converted to the other currency (or only BTC/USD) via an automatic market trade on either the internal or MtGox market, whatever yields more (e.g. on internal I get 0.5 BTC after fees for my 40 USD, on MtGox 0.52 --> trade on MtGox). You might even offer a split (keep 10% of interest in USD to fight fiat inflation, convert rest to BTC because you're "cowardly long" on BTC
)
* Please display offers as they were entered somewhere - it might be fine to display a grouping for overview (graphics might be even better...) but there should be some kind of advanced page where you can find exact numbers (maybe with some filters?) to post/fill offers.
* Please display the current (I think it's valid for 15 minutes, right?) APR next to "V.I.R." in brackets, something like "V.I.R. (currently 234.5678%)".
Also giving a few numbers on how much profit your traders + lenders make might be interesting and be good PR (as far as I've seen, most users should have profited quite a bit from the recent rally, even through some growing pains and MtGox lags!).
All in all thanks for addressing issues quite quickly so far and constantly communicating/looking for suggestions/solutions! This still is beta and especially the current issues in lending are probably also just display issues that need to be figured out (show each single offer of a few cents vs. when to group while still making sure offers can be actually filled and not spamming the page).