If they want to join then that's their decision, what's legit is not decided my a few "old school guys" the site has had over 3000 users in like 3-4 days so the growth rate is not a problem at the moment. This is about the community, not a few individual people. Hope my point comes across

We already seem to have Felipe Costa here (he also talked about it on facebook, registered but hasn't filled in all his info yet). A black belt for over 18 years and a BB world champion.

Perhaps more are coming, but also those guys (6+ degrees) are in their 50s or older, so they probably won't bother tweaking with a new internet database that much... Anyway their students should get the ball rolling for their lineages, because those would also be BBs with multiple degrees too.

Both of you make fair points. But it Doesn't solve the issue of how slow it could take for this verification system to carry any validity. For instance outside of Brazil California would probably be the next in line for having the largest jiu-jitsu scene. I tried searching to see if anyone from california has a profile, even opened up a forum with no response. It makes me wonder if this experiment could take years to ever get a real foothold worldwide. Also this is an interesting social experiment in the fact that traditionally in terms of awarding belts goes from the top down. Ie, a black belt awards a student their blue belt. Where as in this system, that does still apply, but a blue belt can easily be validated by other blue belts. On the ugly side, this system also allows for cyber bullying. Here is a theoretical situation- For instance *blue belt bob* is a dick that only goes to open mats in his city. His blue belt might have been legitimately awarded, but he shows up to academies with ringworm and hurts everyone he rolls with, sometimes he even hurts himself. He's just an overall asshole so everyone votes him down. Of course this isn't the intended use for the down vote, but it's a possibility. I'm very curious to see the evolution of this site, it might expose fake belts, or it might expose some of the ugly personalities prevalent in the BJJ community. I Guess we will have to wait and see.

Ryan, the site has been live for 4 days. We are almost at 200 verified profiles and the daily voting volume is going up exponentially as more gets verified. I doubt you will have to wait years. Just have a little patience :)

Christian Graugart, I know it's still new and i believe it has a lot of potential, otherwise i wouldn't have made a profile. One thing i would like to see on this site has to do with the home page. When it shows "people you may know," "recently verified", "profiles that need votes" all we see is a first name and a TINY photo. This makes it hard to recognize and connect with people we may know. I suggest either bigger photo modules or perhaps adding a last name. Perhaps it would help people connect with friends and training partners. What do you think?

If you click on "See all" button, you will see get a full list with full names under the circles. I am making them small to optimize performance with all these thousands of users flooding in.

oh great! i didn't see that. I was using my Phone so that's probably why. Thank you

Yeah we're not really optimized for mobile browsers yet :)

just to clarify
you meant the "load more" button right?

Correct :)

I predict that 6 months from now this things will be HUGE

For sure. Respect to the old school, but jiu jitsu is for everyone. Except for butt scooters.

Depends what generation of grappler you are, on who is “old school”.

Old school to me is Carlson Sr, Helio, Rickson, etc. When I started ADCC just began, and Renzo/Royler/Arona/Lister/Sperry etc we’re huge

I'm with Mike on this one. One of the first tournaments I ever attended was a NAGA in Connecticut. Renzo and Sperry were walking around coaching. Matt Serra had just gotten his black belt and was doing a superfight (grapplng only). The Gracies, the Machados, Joe Moreira, Fabio Gurgel, Mario Sperry, Allan Goes..... those were the "old school" guys back then.

Well, we have Roy Dean, Pedro Duarte, Randy Bloom, Lucio Linhares etc etc so it's getting there. I think the generation(s) before them will never arrive here... though maybe Bustamante or Machados or someone like them will sign up one day...

What I actually would like to see and don't at the moment is any of the current sport BB elite.