This is just pushing the problem one step removed.
Is it not only relevant what you trade for your groceries?
If you can find someone to take BAT for that, in stable exchange rates, then your point stands.
If you have to acquire $ then what the exchange rate is for $ to BAT comes back into relevance.
Again, perpetually trading BAT back and forth for showing ads/watching ads is restating my premise about holding BAT.
Whether people will be willing to do so greatly depends on exchange rates and volatility.
If you're making that purchase, you might as well time it with a down-swing in the price (or away from an up-swing). Some users will spend more cycles on timing their buys than others, and those users will have a stabilizing effect on the price.
Also, the price of BAT in USD over the last 60 days has stayed between 0.12 and 0.24... it's not exactly as crazy as you're making it out to be.
> saving a few pennies on transaction costs
The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.
As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?
The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.