[safeplanet-fesa]

Exactly. I am a big hater of everything that even remotely feels like a shitcoin. BAT is a silly useless project; I would not hate it if there was no conflict of interests, even if it's a silly project; but there is a huge conflict of interest - the developers want to make money out of thin air by issuing their tokens.

I already wrote this before in another comment. Basic Attention Token is not a secure cryptographic system. The idea to pay tokens for shown ads cannot be cryptographically secure. There is no known way to have a cryptographically strong "Proof-of-Watch". All that browser does is, when a user watches an ad, it communicates to its backend and asks the backend to send a token to an address attached to the user. It's not a cryptographic system that mines coins by showing ads.

It's a useless gimmick that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. The real coins are so valuable because they are cryptographically strong. This thing is centralized and its mechanism of payments for ad views is not cryptographically strong. The token has some value only because of peoples' stupidity.

[jonathansampson]

There seems to be some confusion here; users aren't paid for watching ads in Brave. When an ad notification has been delivered, the user is paid. There's a subtle difference there. Brave (because it is the browser) is able to determine when an ad has been displayed, better than any JavaScript-based client that exists today on the Web. Presently, ads are only shown as desktop notifications (no publisher ads at this time). When the notification is registered, your end-of-month payout increases.

Judging by your choice of words, I assume you're a proponent of using Bitcoin. We did this, originally. Unfortunately, Bitcoin was at that time experiencing serious issues with network congestion and large fees. Our users (who only with to buy $5 or $10 at a time) would often have to pay nearly as much in fees. That clearly isn't sustainable. Introducing BAT (on the Ethereum blockchain) meant we had a faster, more reliable system. It also meant the creation of the User Growth Pool, a reservoir of 300 million tokens that could be gifted to early users to raise this novel apparatus off the ground (and it has been working wonderfully at that).

If there are any questions I can answer for you, I'd be happy to chat further.

[bogomipz]

I applaud all of the privacy efforts by Brave so far. Can you say what the long term business plan is for Brave? At some point you have to monetize it to make it sustainable. Is this where the crypto coin mentioned here comes into play? If so will there be an alternative subscription-based model?

[safeplanet-fesa]

I'm not willing to really try to prove that BAT embedded in Brave is a fundamentally flawed project. Because there are so many project of this kind in the current blockchain industry that I dislike very much, that I don't have enough time and motivation to dispute every such project. People who see what kind of clownade current blockchain industry is, will see it on their own. Those who don't think so, I don't want to convince (I tried before a lot, but marketing of big "blockchain" projects overpowers any words of a couple of geeks).

1. The power of blockchain is in its cryptographic strength. Without cryptographic strength a blockchain is worthless. Strength of a system is defined by the weakest link. The weak link of Brave + BAT is in inability to mathematically prove an ad view. Neither there is a known way to cryptographically mine coins by viewing ads. This means, there are no cryptographically secure methods to pay for ads. What you made is a program that displays an ad and ask your server to send coins to the user. Of course, this can be spoofed. Hackers can reverse engineer how Brave communicates with your backend and spoof it. There is no cryptographic way to prove that an ad has been shown. Hackers can make the windows with ads invisible etc, and still receive reward. And I'm sure they are doing it, but as long as spoofing rates are within your business model, you don't mind because everyone is making money and you don't want to ruin the party.

2. I'm not a proponent of Bitcoin particularly. I dislike everyone who creates a new coin for a fake reason, for something that doesn't need a new coin and issues a trillion tokens. I am for progress, and I don't mind when a new really innovative coins appears with a separate blockchain, but I hate when a new coin is created just to issue a trillion of tokens, give it away for free, and in this way giving it perceivable value. It at least must be mined, and some resources (electricity and hardware) must be spent to back up its value; a trillion token issued out of nothing don't have value. I would not care if it was just a silly useless project, which GitHub is full of, but there is an irresistible temptation to create a heap of tokens, keep a little bit, give the rest away, apply some sleazy marketing and make people believe that there is some value behind the tokens. A decent project must avoid at all cost creation of a new token without a reason that absolutely requires a new token, and instead use an existing token that has value behind it (resources are being spent on creation of that heap of digital money).

I always liked blockchain, I will always like it. I use Monero much. But the current blockchain industry is full of projects that are fake blockchains, centralized blockchains and especially systems where a blockchain and a product cannot be cryptographically linked. Such as reselling electricity through blockchain, track fruits from a farm to a shop through blockchain etc. I only don't understand if people pretend that they don't see this because everyone has a share in the growing industry, or they are really so stupid that they don't see the fundamental problem.

[SomeOldThrow]

Actually this is a missing piece that essentially allows content based micro transactions and allows cutting out ad salesmen. Win for everyone. But ad salesmen.