The budget of BAT you set each month comes from your wallet, and is essentially your personal donation to the various websites you use, it's not related to ads. This wallet can run out in the same way any wallet can run out, and you'd have to refill it.
The BAT you can earn from seeing ads is separate and unrelated to that. Maybe it goes into the same wallet but that's not important.
You can do none of them, one of them, the other, or both, but they aren't really two related features. They both just happen to use BAT as their money mechanism.
I would guess that the vast majority of people would prefer to see their BAT go up when they viewed ads, and down when they paid content creators, and have no more interaction than that. To the viewer, it would be monopoly money, but they'd be happy because advertisers would essentially be paying creators.
The idea that I'd have to actually put my credit card number in somewhere, and think of it as my donations, and advertisers paying me... that's a whole different mindset and has a lot more friction.
It sounds like you're saying that people can purchase BAT for their wallets? I was thinking along the lines of the only method of acquisition being basically "view the brave ads".
Can users purchase BAT outright for their wallets?
The ads are a completely separate feature, you enable voluntary ads to be shown to you, and in exchange you get paid a portion of what the advertisers paid to display those ads. This is in contrast to the most common model we have online today, where you view ads in exchange for using free services like gmail or youtube.
It's likely that these two features both use the same BAT wallet tied to your brave browser, but that's the only thing they have in common.
If I had stocked up my wallet with $ over the summer, those $'s I exchanged could be up to about 35% less now. We're discussing saving pennies on transaction costs while we lost massive amounts on exchange rate slippage and volatility. This is ridiculously silly, why would creators or users go for this? If you want to say creators will immediately exchange for $, then we must consider trading fees & effort/friction to doing so.
But for users, storing any significant value in a wallet for a more than a day or so is a non starter.
Normally, to accept digital donations, I'd need to have something like a Paypal account, and follow their terms of service (or that of another company like Patreon). If I do anything that company doesn't like, like produce and sell fireworks or draw porn, they will forbid me from using their service and users will be unable to donate to me. Or if I'm in Venezuela and the US embargo the country, the company might block donations to me because they have to by US law.
Cryptocurrencies try to solve this problem by being "neutral" in a way, nobody central truly owns it, and nobody can based on preference, policy or political reasons forbid users from using the system.
The second case arguably devolves, game-theory wise to the market never valuing subsequent new currencies with much significance compared to Bitcoin. It's the same argument I made above, just replace Bitcoin for $. Why hold BAT if some new crypto might come along and be better. Opening oneself up to appeals to new, "better" currencies based on features means there's never any trust, incentive to, or faith in holding current ones. Those that take this to logical conclusion will only/mostly value Bitcoin.
There will always be some floor on many of these currencies based on censorship resistance, but again that's niche relative to addressable market... and those who in their own minds won't get kicked off payment processors won't have use for a less censorable one. Of course, BAT is less decentralized than Bitcoin so not sure it's immune to political influence (we know who runs Brave).
Donations generally can be achieved with Bitcoin of course. Micro-payment currencies being stable relative to alternatives is the point of contention here. I don't see stability coming anytime soon, therefore I don't see large adoption either. I'll happy to be surprised though.
https://blog.coinbase.com/buy-and-sell-bat-on-coinbase-454a7...
What if a user doesn't earn 10 BAT a month browsing?
It seems like that system would break down over time.