Couchsurfing opened in 2004 and drew a young, itinerant crowd that was less interested in accumulating wealth than sharing it. Like Airbnb years later, hosts and guests wrote their own profiles on the site and reviewed each other after a stay. One ingenious element of the service was how the company confirmed people’s identity in the years before people could use their Facebook profiles. Couchsurfing asked for a user’s credit card and sent a postcard containing a verification code to the address associated with the card. When the user typed the code into the site, he or she was verified. The
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