The Black Mirror episode "15 Million Merits" has something like this as its premise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

Some thoughts after going through the whitepaper,

> The BAT will, in early stages, be specifically tied to Brave browsers and Brave servers, along with verified publishers

Before this, they mention that other browsers are free to adopt BAT. However, no mention is made of a way to ensure the user attention data reported is legitimate. Presumably then only the Brave browser will be able to use this token. A novel, trustless/decentralised way to verify user attention would be of a paper on its own.

> Ad fraud will be prevented or reduced by publication of source code and cryptographically secure transactions. Ads served to individual browser/users will also be rate-limited and tied to active windows and tabs.

How will this be ensured without some kind of centralised whitelist of signatures/keys?

If the system is going to be centralised anyway, why use a blockchain? Blockchains are terribly inefficient append only DBs, and are only useful when there is not even a single server on the internet that you can trust. There is no point to using a blockchain if everything that can go on the blockchain is going to be mediated by a company/government/organisation.

> A 300 million endowment is for early adopters of Brave and the BAT at up to 5 BAT/user

followed by

> BATs are meant only for experts in cryptographic tokens and blockchain-based software systems

So they expect to get up to 60 million "experts in cryptographic tokens" to switch to their browser?

> However, no mention is made of a way to ensure the user attention data reported is legitimate.

Exactly. Looks like a race problem, again. Just looking at the diagram on their site (user gets tokens for attention), I immediately thought "Write and deploy attention signaling bots" ...

sorry -- bat was a scam. https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-podcast-blog/a-look-at-the-ba...

What is your definition of a scam?

Selling a large slice of the tokens to a small group of specific investors, such that they obtain a much larger price when these are listed. Because they were in so few holders from day0, and the 'auction' closed so quickly, price discovery entirely up to small group of 'investors'. Its birthing shark whales to steal from the little people.

This was back before the real real ICO scams, so it looks pure in comparison. 2017, what a year!

Wealth is always concentrated in the hands of a few. It's the same story with Bitcoin.

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-97-are-held-by-4-of-a...

By that definition I guess all startups and IPOs are also scams.

The difference is that you can't do a IPO with just little more than a white paper, like most ICOs do.

"IPOs" happening separately from actually listing on an exchanges are always scams. Startups soliciting investment from the public rather than accredited investors are almost always scams.