From what I can tell, it looks like the "official" website of BELA,
http://belacoin.org/ lists 5 pools, one of them seems to no longer be existent, and another is reporting mining 0 miners mining BELA currently. So it looks like that mining might be fairly centralized, and I have personally never heard of the pools, and cannot say how trustworthy/reputable those pools are.
I am not saying that you guys are in the middle of getting scammed, I am just saying that there are some risks of funding (part of) the loan prior to poloinex accepting the deposit. But then again, lending is the managing of risk, and balancing that risk with the potential reward of profiting engaging in certain transactions.
We are certainly aware of this.
We have looked at the risks and discussed them. We are currently looking at 2 very different risks.
1: Double spend by borrower.
This risk is certainly very important, as it would result in a full loss of the collateral. We waited for about 90 confirmations, before we partially filled the loan. This was done, as the borrower has stated that they were sent from Poloniex. To back this up, he was able to prove this with screenshots.
2: Collateral losing value
This risk is the biggest. As we are pretty sure the transaction came from Poloniex. We do not believe the collateral falls more then 50% in value, which is enough to cover the part we already filled. A cryptocurrency falling more then 50% in value is not unheard of, but it is a low risk.
We can't isolate one of the risk, without worrying about the other.
Edit:
I have updated the thread with more information regarding what was discussed yesterday.
