I pay for Spotify, I pay for Memrize, I pay for Tarnsap, I bought a Fontawesome subscription last friday, I used to donate to a couple Patreons. I donate punctually to FreeBSD, Wikipedia and a few other open source projects. I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to prostitute my private life to do it.
If content creators don't want my money but insist that I should let them spam me with ads and share my private info with third parties then it's their problem, not mine.
Life is too short for me to curate "cryptographic interest tokens" in order for advertisers to serve me content that I don't want to see anyway.
Some cryptocurrency projects wanted to develop a cheap and easy micropayment system. That seems a lot more interesting to me although that probably can't work as long as the "currency" part of "cryptocurrency" remains more aspirational than practical.
BAT is trying to change that - instead of ads you put money into Brave and pay those tiny amounts to creators directly. The idea is that you might not even know that you often read some blog and the browser distribute BAT for you (if you want).
Honestly it is not about the cryptocurrency hype at all. Like everybody wanted some legit usecase for crypto and now when there is one then people hate it because it is crypto...
I'm still not really considering switching to Brave but if this BAT thing makes it into Firefox (as an extension for instance) I'll probably give it a try.
I remain unconvinced that decentralized blockchains can really scale up to the number of transactions that would be generated by everybody "tipping" individual website as they browse them but that's a different issue.
They also don't have to make the transactions instant. They are basically donations so the transaction time does not really matter. They could spread the transactions for efficiency.
Plus crypto is evolving and they are counting on it. When their scaling issues come there might very well be some ok solution in likes of lightning network. Or doing stuff offchain.
For me Brave is actually secondary browser now because it is the "ungoogled chrome" that is easy to install and i can test webwork i do without chrome.
You don't have to, just don't opt-in for Brave rewards (aka ads), and fund your tipping wallet with your money (you can as of today) and voilà !
You'll have:
- No ads, no trackers
- You contribute toward content creators with your cash like you do with Spotify/Netflix using a built-in wallet in your browser
- A fast and privacy-first browser
Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.
No, they don't take a cut if you fund your wallet directly and use it to tip the content creators.
>If it's the latter what's Brave's business model
Here is how they make money, just pasting my comment from below:
By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse.
Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens
Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers)
So the Ads / Get paid to browse part of Brave is 100% optional and opt-in, many people think it is mandatory
>Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.
Yeah, I'm kinda fascinated about Brave's model, I'm wondering if it will be the first cryptocurrency-based solution that make sense to me
Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software 15% Brave ad partners 15% Browser users 15% of the revenue.
So roughly 30%
If that ruins their business model, they need to figure out how to collect payment before sending me the web page. Don’t freely send OTA TV signals into my house then get offended when I decide to skip the ads. Same thing.
I think a lot of sites have already figured this out. They sell t-shirts. Mugs. Premium podcast episodes, and Patreon sponsorships. The Web is working around this as we speak. But the Googles of the world will make it sound like we’re “stealing web pages”. This will be “the new piracy”. All to defend a business model that relies on my equipment assaulting me with your malicious ads on your behalf. No thank you.
I have a really hard time reconciling this opinion with "Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you."
Even with ad blockers, I have much more control what information I give out than if I trust someone with my credit card number.
Even if the content creator is genuine, there have been so many hacks in the past.
Credit cards are also not good for microtransactions and BAT is a potentially enabler for them. Sure, we aren't there yet but it doesn't look as impossible as it were in 1999 when microtransactions came up the first time as a solution to the ads problem.
For me, I like the idea of paying for content without having to supply my credit card number to each news outlet that I want to read. With no link to me directly the websites no longer need to track me and Brave can go out of it's way to back that up. No need to curate tokens. Just switch profiles if/when you need to.
BTW you don't _need_ to see any ads at all. You can instead just buy BATs and use them for content payment without ads.
User experience aside it makes it clear when you revoke permission to your data
You can point to the public transaction where you did that and show consent to that advertiser and whoever they copied that data to, massive liability for them if they arent playing along
A step towards cooperation, not a cure all
Tokens are also useful in bootstrapping any two sided marketplace, and people would also be aligned in seeing it become more valuable. To you, that means damning unobjectiveness, to others that means necessary skin in the game to know what theyre talking about.
>What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens at different times.
I'm really perplex. People who care enough about their privacy to make use of something like that are probably those who don't want ads or tracking at all anyway. The rest of the population obviously doesn't care.
I personally can't imagine ever willingly enabling ads in my browser. You want me to pay for your service? Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you. If you prefer to beg for me to turn my ad blocker off then be my guest but I won't do it.
The idea of installing Brave, curating several "tokens" containing my interests and selecting what to send to which website is frankly preposterous to me and of dubious value for the advertisers.