Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments | Hacker News Reader

Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

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106 pointsallenscott78 comments

To the critics: The problem is, how to pay for content while maintaining user control over their privacy? Micropayments seem like a solution, and Brave has found an economical way to implement them. How would you change Brave and,

* Still solve the confidentiality problem

* Be realistically economical: Everyone gets paid

* Earn a profit (not a sin and a good way to make the project sustainable)

* Have a technical and practical means of widespread adoption (e.g., personal contact with one website at a time isn't practical).

Social change, such as user confidentiality on the Internet, comes when someone finds a practical way to get it done, not when we all complain about it. Naysayers on the sidelines who simply don't like change and find fault for sport are, as reformers have long pointed out, the biggest obstacles.

Kudos to Brave for tackling this tough and very important issue. They just might change the world.

"* Earn a profit (not a sin and a good way to make the project sustainable)"

It is a sin if you're doing it by replacing a publisher's advertising with your own.

I believe the default setting in brave is to block ads not replace. The user has control over what the browser does.

My alternative is to block all ads indiscriminately so that all of those malware/spyware/scamy/annoying/data draining/slow/buggy site's are wiped from existence and all that's left are site's that either:

host their own static ads,

use a pay wall,

are promotional site's,

are government run,

are government funded,

are publicly funded

are personally funded.

I'm personally of the camp that for most users, usability matters more than privacy. As trakcers violated both.

If I'm an advertiser, why would I want to advertise only to people who can't afford $5/month to turn off ads internet-wide?

That's the problem advertising faces; as soon as you encourage people with disposable income to avoid all advertising, the whole system becomes pointless.

Says a lot about the sociatal value of the system, really.

But it's better (at least in some respects) than the alternative, which is that people don't have the option to see the content even if they are willing to pay. That happens because they can't get enough people to follow through on that valuation of the content (e.g. due leakage through client circumvention) in order to produce it.

It's a massive coordination problem that Brave (and IIRC the Google Contributor project) are attempting to solve.

Or, rather, the business model changes to paying more and paying in more circumstances to avoid ads.

To encourage revenue, the ads might get more and more obnoxious.

Well, since the goal is to make advertisers redundant, that's not really an issue.

I don't think that's an accurate way to portray it. I might be able to afford $5/month, but I'd rather buy five songs a month with that money. Ad-free Web viewing is a luxury, not a necessity.

Also, not all advertising targets disposable income. I might see an ad for clothing, which I would need to buy at some point. Maybe I'm underwater on my mortgage and want to learn one weird tip to get refinanced. Plenty of ads out there for that.

A more sinister angle is that there is a type of person who doesn't have a ton of disposable income because he's more susceptible to buying stuff that he sees in ads.

Ad-free Web viewing is a luxury, not a necessity.

Given the prevalence of ads as a malware/privacy invasion vector, I'm not sure that's true anymore.

Browsing the wider internet without a blocker on is like walking down a bad part of town and sticking yourself with every discarded needle you find.

I agree with you in principle; I now use ad blockers after arguing for years that people shouldn't. But in reality that's a tough case to make.

Sure, the NSA might find out what web sites I've been visiting, but that's a really abstract concept for most people. I don't want to attack your analogy too much, but sticking yourself with discarded needles is a much more tangible risk, and doesn't bring any benefits along with it.

There are some sites I frequent that are egregious about ads, but they provide enough value to me that I keep going back.

I was referring more to the creepy/invasive nature of the ad companies than the NSA, but I suppose that applies too.

Remember that I mentioned malware too - that is a very tangible risk, to my computer and any computer that it's connected to. I'm not speaking hyperbolically here either, malware loaded advertising winds up on large ad networks used on reputable sites[1].

My personal policy remains unchanged: when the site owner takes responsibility for what their server does to my computer (including reimbursement for time and materials when an infection shows up), I'll consider unblocking the ads, and not a moment before.

As it stands, the person who takes that snippet of Javascript from Adsense and ignorantly whacks it into their page wants all of the benefit (ad $$$) with none of the responsibility.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising#History

The problem with ads is that they are generally terrible. I quite like quality advertising, like this for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf0YXK6tQrM

> That's the problem advertising faces; as soon as you encourage people with disposable income to avoid all advertising, the whole system becomes pointless.

And if you don't offer that option, more and more people will just block your ads for free.

I have a website. How do I let the Brave Browser know what my bitcoin address is, so that people who visit my site can send me money? Presumably I can just shove it in a HTTP response header or HTML meta tag? Anyone know where the docs for this are?

Oh. They take a 5% cut. Next question, how do I prevent this system from working on any of my websites?

Alternative: microtip [1] [2].

[1] https://autotip.io/docs/microtip-meta-tag

[2] https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions

How else would you suggest they maintain the infrastructure without turning the users back into the product?

What infrastructure is there to maintain? Conceptually all that needs to happen is:

* Website sends HTTP response header containing a bitcoin address

* Browser keeps a bitcoin wallet

* Browser shows a button to send bitcoin from said wallet to said bitcoin address

And that's it.

Yes, that is ideally how it would work. Yes, they have infrastructure which needs paying for, but that infrastructure only exists in the first place so that they can take a cut of the donations.

If the system was designed right any infrastructure could be distributed (put a bitcoin address and a notification URL in your HTML or something dead simple like that) and development could be sponsored by interested parties if needed. There wouldn't be any need for a fee.

> If the system was designed right any infrastructure could be distributed (put a bitcoin address and a notification URL in your HTML or something dead simple like that) and development could be sponsored by interested parties if needed. There wouldn't be any need for a fee.

You need a fee because otherwise nobody will do (or is doing) the work to implement it.

As I said, certainly there are many websites which stand to profit from this who could contribute.

Of course, with something this small and basically one-off, given the number of open source devs building bitcoin projects I'd be surprised if no one's done something similar already.

By taking a lot less than 5% of the donations and creating a successful and widely used product.

One would hope that if they get sufficiently successfuly they'd drop the percentage, but requiring them to achieve wider scale just to initially break even doesn't seem like it sets up good incentives to me.

Implementing window.payment like Google and Apple do?

Charge for the product? A popular line from people who hate ads ;)

You could refuse to serve to web browsers with a Brave user-agent. Or I could fetch your website using wget and strip out ads. If you can't control a user agent in other situations, why do you want to control it here?

I don't want to control the user agent, I just want to programatically announce that I am not talking part in the Brave micro-tip system, so that no end-user funds are put in a wallet for me which will never be withdrawn.

Looking into this further, they would eventually email me after there are $10 worth of funds queued up for me, and then after 30 days of me ignoring them, those funds would be spread out amongst other sites who do want them.

However, until that wallet has at least $10 in it, Brave is just sitting on top of free money. I don't want that.

[edit] P.S, Brave doesn't identify it's self in the user agent header. I just downloaded the Linux version and it identified it's self thus:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36

> Looking into this further, they would eventually email me after there are $10 worth of funds queued up for me, and then after 30 days of me ignoring them, those funds would be spread out amongst other sites who do want them.

And this means the users, who think they are contributing to you, actually aren't at all. This seems deceptive.

> However, until that wallet has at least $10 in it, Brave is just sitting on top of free money. I don't want that.

One reason could be they don't want to bug website owners about small amounts.

So let the website owner supply a wallet address so Brave doesn't have to hold onto the money?

How kind of them to hang on to the money instead of bugging the people it was intended for.

Doesn't justify the 30 day limit, though. That there needs to be some limit is clear, but I don't see a justification for it being only 30 days.

Full disclosure I'm Founder of https://pagescrub.com a "pay for no ads" project

Based on my research Brave will probably have a hard time through UX issues and companies/webpages boycotting it.

I talked to readability founder who tried to take money on behalf of webpages when blocking ads. Readers were very happy about the service and loved to pay. But the issue was the companies didn't "take" their money. Mainly because they didn't like that readability did all of that without asking them before. One can say they were simply pissed. From my view Braves users also have to change to much. A new browser + a new payment system.

Best would be if the reader pays on one page and the rest is done for them. No new browser, No Plugin, No Special payment system. Of course this page has to negotiate with each Website first. With https://pagescrub.com I tried exactly that.

I want to like the idea of Brave but have a hard time seeing this project taking off. It requires buy-in both from publishers, who make more money from ads, and from visitors, who probably don't want to spend money, configure a payment option, or switch from their current browser. Good idea for a cross-browser plugin, but an entire browser?

Ya, agreed. I'd much rather have this built into my ad blocker extension. IE, I could configure a wallet there which I could fund and they could send micro-payments based on the ads I block.

(sorta like Google's contributor but more open / distributed)

Yup. I see no reason why this could not be implemented as a WebExtension (which will be compatible with Chrome/FF/Edge). Perhaps performance would suffer a bit relative to native. Having a synced history between Chrome devices, is enough reason for me to not switch browsers, let alone stored form inputs.

Having a general purpose wallet built into the browser would be quite interesting. Think 1 cent Bitcoin paywalls.

It's a neat idea, but I feel like users need to be rewarded for it to really take off. Look at Patreon as an example: If you support someone there, they will often deliver rewards every month and payment is tied to the reward.

This straightforward implementation ignores some of the privacy ideas, but might be a starting point: If a site notices I'm using a Brave-compliant browser, it tells me that I can unlock some new articles, music, artwork, search features, or whatever by funding my Brave wallet and clicking the 'support' button. Once supported, they deliver the missing content.

Even a simple 'Thank you for supporting us with Brave' would probably encourage use.

That is the plan. Of the ad money Brave receives, it is meant to take a small cut, give a large piece to the publisher, and give a cut to the user.

See https://brave.com/assets/blog_images/image03.png from https://blog.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-naa-a-better-d....

Publishers hate Brave though: they destroy much of the value those impressions have and then take a cut.

Or at least they hate the idea of Brave, I doubt they take it seriously enough to really hate it. Brave will probably be resigned to the software scrap heap after this funding round runs out.

As the interface shows, users get a report of how many times (and for how long) they viewed their top X websites. They then have an new option to contribute Y$ to those sites proportionally and effortlessly.

This is a totally new option for people who dont want to see ads.

Publishers who hate this plan show similar behavior to tobacco companies in the 1980s. They have a profitable, entrenched market and don't want to yield one bit of it.

> Publishers hate Brave

This seems doubtful. Brave is almost completely unknown.

It's interesting that the balance is displayed in USD, instead of Bitcoins. Does this mean that Brave is holding on to my USD, and buying up Bitcoins at time of payment? Seems like both I and content creators could get shafted with exchange rates.

Who exactly would use this product?

You'd have to be someone who doesn't mind ads, but doesn't like bad ones, while also being someone who is willing to pay for content so you do not see ads.

More to the point, in what possible universe is there a moral justification for stripping a publisher of the advertising they've selected, only to replace it with your own, and then dictating to the publisher what percentage of that revenue they deserve?

If you care about users, just strip out ads. Don't replace them.

If you care about publisher's getting paid, just establish a mechanism that makes it easy for people to stick a META tag in their header which shows a Bitcoin address for payment remittance.

Publisher's can then implement a mechanism to verify whether individual users have paid.

If your project needs to make a profit, either charge for the browser or the service which intelligently strips out ads, the way Tivo charges for their "Guide" feature.

This is a convoluted business model which helps literally no one other than Brave.

> Who exactly would use this product?

People who value their privacy and don't like to be tracked

Those people would just use an AdBlocker, in their existing browser and on their mobile device.

Sorry, I should have said: People who want content creators to be paid fairly, but who don't want to be tracked.

Do you pay with a new, anonymous bitcoin address every single time? Because otherwise this seems like the ultimate tracking tool.

I suppose Brave could bundle a mixer service with it?

I'd imagine the audience is similar to the people that "give gold" to strangers for a funny, insightful, etc comment on Reddit.

To me it seems like the question is not whether or not people are willing, but is it easy enough to work.

> establish a mechanism that makes it easy for people to stick a META tag in their header which shows a Bitcoin address for payment remittance

Hmm, that's an interesting idea. Has any such tag been standardized or proposed?

Not in a formalized way, as far as I can tell but I'm not the first person to ever mention that idea. I think I've seen a Chrome extension or two which do it.

And hey, if you want to make more money, offer a service which makes payment verification/notification really easy to integrate for publishers.

Can someone elaborate on where the Brave wallet is stored? Is it stored on the clients device or on Brave's servers somewhere?

I feel like articles about the Brave model tend to misleadingly represent the situation.

Brave has servers that replace websites' ads on-the-fly. They receive money from advertizers for doing that. As a result, the wallet is on Brave's servers.

But publishers don't get paid. The money is stuck on Brave's servers until publishers come to an agreement with Brave, which the huge majority of websites have not. In fact, some publishers have expressed their intent to sue Brave (see http://www.wired.com/2016/04/brave-software-publishers-respo...). Since Brave behaves like they have made a unilateral contract with publishers that publishers have not signed, there is a fair chance that the publishers could win in court.

Could this push advertisers toward delivery over https?

I am assuming that brave won't replace https content on the fly of course.

In theory, they actually can replace https content on the fly.

They are the browser. They have control.

They can convert the visible URL to a call to their proxy server, which performs an HTTPS call on your behalf. They receive the request, replace ads, and send it back to you in TLS, along with the certificate information that they received from the real server, which they'd show the user.

But I expect they won't do that, so one can hope.

They wrote about URL based microdonations.

For example for content creators like youtubers so that youtube doesnt get a cut from the donation.

How does Brave decide who has a legitimate claim on that money?!

Presumably the user who generates the URL can claim the funds.

One case in which Brave does not want to replace website ads is for sites that run their own ad networks, or ones which have a contract with an ad network expressing that they will not resell user data.

A large part of their motivation hinges on ad networks routinely reselling user data without express consent. The business opportunity assumes users will pay (in this case by viewing ads to benefit Brave, the website owner, and themselves) for the privilege of not having their browsing habits tracked. If the net result of this experiment is that websites move toward non-tracking ad networks with legal protections against reselling user data, users no longer have incentive to use Brave, but it's a net win for user and website owner.

Donation buttons on websites are no where near as prolific as they used to be 15 years ago (Paypal donate buttons). I can't help but feel this is just because people don't want to donate - they'd rather keep their money. This is not a friction problem.

This feels like Changetip v2 which is in my opinion not a viable business model. Their target market is people who want to donate widely and not specifically. This is a user group I don't think exists, the ones who want to donate are a subset of the websites most dedicated users.

In my opinion this is an unsustainable business model.

So it's like Google contributor, but it runs through Brave.

Brave is a story of how to take a good product and make it bad. It started out as "Link Bubble" which was one of the most innovative apps on Android. Brave bought it, introduced a number of bugs, and added "Brave Shields". These 'shields' generally break most sites around the web by blocking trackers and, more importantly, replacing website ads with ads that pay Brave.

Note: I work for Google but have nothing to do with Google contributor.

> replacing website ads with ads that pay Brave

Do you have a source for this? I had not heard of this until now.

https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html

The graph shows the following payout distribution:

  * 55% publishers

  * 15% ad partners

  * 15% brave

  * 15% brave users

Whatever you think of internet ads, I don't think Brave is a publisher's best friend.

Brave Software incorporated more than 1 year ago. They raised $7M (?) over its existence. But no one practically knows about them. And who cares about ads and Bitcoin? I personally just ignore them everywhere, have kind of immunity already. The other people use AdBlock. Why would anyone want to pay for removing ads on web, use another browser for that, or pay for that with Bitcoin (who cares?)? I guess, I am missing the whole point of what those guys do and why...

It's a good start, but I think there needs to be a meta tag (as mentioned) to specify a payment address rather than have Brave hold the money.

I hope this comes soon

Isn't this kind of like Flattr (https://flattr.com/) ?

With a choice of paying someone to remove ads or removing those ads with any one of a number of free methods, I'll choose option #2.

Is there a way to add bitcoins to Brave, without having to scan my ID on Coinbase?

Yes, it generates an address to send them to.

Ok, but where do I get bitcoin?

You can usually buy small amounts of Bitcoin directly on www.coinbase.com via ACH without ID. Depends on the fraud score the ML fraud system assigns to you.

Circle and LocalBitcoins are also options (although I've never used Circle).

Disclaimer: I work for Coinbase

Why add features that users don't really care about before features that users do really care about?

There are a minimum set of extended functions that I need from a browser that I'm going to use daily. They are: a speed dial that I can manually organize, a quick javascript switcher and an adblocker. Brave has only one of those.

So I'll stick with Chrome/Chromium on my desktops thank you very much. On mobile, Dolphin Browser gives me 2 out of the 3. So, for a long while I did most of my mobile browsing on an 8 inch Windows tablet with full Chrome. Recently I have been trying out an iPad Pro 9.7 to replace that tablet. It's a better device in every way except for the web browsing which is a second rate experience on iOS.

However, I'm thinking of forking Brave for iOS so that I can make it do whatever I want. It's just a wrapper for WkWebView written in Swift. Shouldn't be too hard to alter for my purposes - I might get started this weekend!

This could be said of any innovation. Users want faster horses.

Wake me up when they support financial privacy. Monero or nothing.

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