BasicAttentionToken Roadmap 1.0 | Hacker News Reader

BasicAttentionToken Roadmap 1.0

basicattentiontoken.org

79 pointsguribe9457 comments

Who would run a browser specifically designed to track and show ads? I can't imagine it ever being enough to support the ecosystem.

Edit: And how is the locally gathered "attention" monitoring not exploitable by the people who get paid for the attention? Running a bunch of VMs that "pay attention" to the ad seems like a cheap thing to rig up.

I have been hoping for a long time that browsers could use cryptocurrency to monetize publishers through methods other than advertising.

Was very glad to see Brave pairing a browser with cryptocurrency (though I don't know how they will handle the scalability issues), and then very disappointed to see that it's not actually replacing ads, but instead encouraging users to watch them.

Why do you need a cryptocurrency to make the model work? If people wanted to do this, couldn't Chrome build a "Google Token" that does the same thing?

They could and it would probably not get enough traction. "Just another walled garden and more power for Google to squash whoever they like or don't like, sigh". Hard to get people excited about that. I suppose the idea here is that crypto-based tokens are more open: I'd need to research how exactly it is handled on Ethereum chain but I imagine Brave won't solely be in control over what happens to BAT.

Interoperability I think is the biggest hurdle. There's nothing particularly special about blockchains here except that it's really easy to move between currencies once you've got accounts on the right exchanges.

Without cryptocurrency, you'd need some way for a user to pay all websites they visit. Ads can go on any browser and be served from any company. Ad networks don't need to interoperate. But if a user is paying publishers, it's a huge hurdle to have to pay a new publisher payment processor every time you visit a new site. Sure, 70% might accept Google payments, but what about the rest of them? And what about the users who are not on Google's payment platform?

Not that cryptocurrency solves all these problems. It's still a hard thing to do. But I think it at least lowers the barrier.

> it's really easy to move between currencies once you've got accounts on the right exchanges.

wait so the users are going to need more than one kind of token? And they're going to need to open accounts on an exchange?

> Without cryptocurrency, you'd need some way for a user to pay all websites they visit. Ads can go on any browser and be served from any company. Ad networks don't need to interoperate. But if a user is paying publishers, it's a huge hurdle to have to pay a new publisher payment processor every time you visit a new site. Sure, 70% might accept Google payments, but what about the rest of them? And what about the users who are not on Google's payment platform?

Hold on, BAT is 1 kind of token. All the ad publishers need to integrate with the BAT. How is this different than having all ad publishers integrating with Google Token?

If there is a competing token, let's call it CAT, how is that different than the AppleToken competing with the Google Token, from the user's perspective?

>How is this different than having all ad publishers integrating with Google Token?

Presumably you wouldn't want to be locked into a proprietary platform that can raise fees once it has an effective monopoly.

How is that different than being locked into the BAT? Brave decides how much BAT will get you an ad spot right?

A blockchain platform can be designed to not give the developer direct control over things like pricing, or anything at all. I don't know if that is what Brave is planning with its ad platform mind you, but it's certainly possible, and would be a differentiator only possible by building on top of a distributed ledger. A good example would be the blockchain itself, where every cost users incur, like transaction fees, is determined by end-user action (e.g. the miners and users), rather than through collusion by some set of owners.

> A blockchain platform can be designed to not give the developer direct control over things like pricing, or anything at all

The developers don't control the price... It's a market between brave/publishers/users.

Are you saying Google's engineers would be able to affect the price? That possibility has no affect on the product's success. That's like saying Amazon engineers can go and change the price of items so we should replace Amazon with a blockchain.

>That's like saying Amazon engineers can go and change the price of items so we should replace Amazon with a blockchain.

Not Amazon engineers, but Amazon itself could raise fees if it attains a comfortable de facto monopoly.

If it does than, then it can get out-competed by Rainforest, which is a clone of Amazon but with lower fees. Then if Sahara comes along and copies Rainforest but uses the blockchain for payments, they won't be able to compete because they will have to pay for blockchain network transaction fees and potential blockchain network backlog (unreliable payments compared to say funding a Google Wallet or some such)

That depends on whether the market leader benefits from network effects. All other things being equal, the market leader in a naturally monopolistic industry, like say social networks, has a much more compelling product than competitors. That allows the market leader to extract monopoly rent.

@hudon - it's a blockchain protocol, so BAT will be bound by the rules of the token as well. I.e. it won't be able to do any gatekeeping on who uses the system and for what purpose, or do any other monopolistic practices.

> " it won't be able to do any gatekeeping on who uses the system and for what purpose"

Agreed. This is actually something the blockchain has that existing systems do not: censorship resistance. The ability to participate and not be shut down, fined, or jailed by the rule of law.

However, if you remove the need to be censorship resistant and assume that no one will use the ad publishing system for illegal activity, I'd be really curious to hear what you mean by "other monopolistic practices".

As for the opening the account on exchange - that won't be necessary soon, because of the distributed exchanges which can do this in the background via smart contracts.

Soon you will be able set up your wallet to automatically convert the incoming tokens into whatever currency you want. Including tokens pegged to USD or any other asset.

To build on what you're saying, I'd also like to pay publishers for content instead of viewing advertising. However, advertising has two useful features.

1. It provides a default way of paying publishers without any action by the consumer (i.e. the see an ad if they don't set up a payment system)

2. It establish a price for viewing the content, (i.e. the price that an advertiser would pay to show you an ad)

For reason 1, I can see how it is necessary to have an advertising option as a default to get the ecosystem rolling.

However I really, really hope that users would get the option of paying publishers directly instead of seeing ads. This is where reason 2 comes into play, it provides a market price for us to pay for the content we consume - just pay what an advertiser would pay.

> Who would run a browser specifically designed to track and show ads?

Yeah, I don't understand Chrome users either.

> Edit:

People already do this with mixed success. There's also nothing stopping you from modifying the browser falsely report that the user actually viewed the ads.

They don't get paid to view the ads though, there's no real motivation right now for most users to spoof views.

But if you are receiving payment for spoofing, you will have a lot more interest in doing it effectively. Especially if the payment is in cryptocurrency, which can't be reversed.

Chrome at least isn't promoted as a great way to be tracked and get ads, they hide their shame like a proper company :) I know fake views are already a thing but it seems like a big issue to leave unsolved and if it's the only vulnerability, efforts on that particular kind of "fraud" will double down. Any model that gives the users machine a key role, isn't going to work long term, it'll eventually be the same ol' cat-and-mouse/race-to-the-bottom games of yore. Advertisers and content creators need to get back to basics, work together and leave the end users machines out of it. I know that doesn't work well for the little guy with a blog, they'll just have to work harder to earn their buck, like they always should have.

Indeed an open source browser that anyone can bot doesn't mix well with the idea of paying people to just watch something... crypto currencies work because they don't rely on trust. This is precisely the opposite of that. The whole idea is fucked on premise right off the bat.

Of course, Ethereum users snap it up at ICO within a single block for something like $33 million. There's way too much stupidity in that market at the moment.

It would be true, but someone like Brendan Eich mush be onto something, right? He can't risk all his reputation for just 33M?

Unless he's going to give everyone new computers which are locked down at the hardware level such that we can't clone and emulate them, there's really nothing he can do. This idea is doomed, plain and simple.

Yep, it looks like a very good reason not to use Brave. It could be anonymous monitoring as they say but I'd feel safer to use a forked version with all the tracking code removed from source.

There is gunna be sooooooo much fraud. It's a huge problem with traditional display ads no reason this would be different.

The browser is ad-free and tracker-free by default and they've stated a few times that it will remain so. Business concerns aside, it really does significantly improve my mobile browsing experience (I'm using it on iOS).

Brave blocks ads and trackers by default, period.

Ads will be opt-in and use a separate open source coomponent.

Anonymous donations (prototyped with bitcoin already, see Payments panel in Preferences/Settings) are opt-in too and they will remain bundled by of course off by default. With user-private ad slots, we expect users will auto-donate their monthly revenue to their top sites.

That's the definitive answer I was looking for. After I read slewis' comment, I took another look and I still couldn't tell if that was truly the case just from the information on the website. The site text is "...privacy-focused browser that blocks malvertisements, trackers..." but I took that to mean it blocks ads/trackers that aren't part of the Brave+BAT system; and "Users, who opt in, receive fewer but better targeted ads..." I took to mean users to who opt in to using Brave. If I was still on iPhone, I would definitely try it based on slewis' recommendation but I'm getting by really well with IceCat and uBlock Origin on Android. Obviously, that isn't any good for content creators.

My biggest beef with ads is the tracking and Brave seem to have a really nice solution to that. I think a lot of people will like it. Personally, I don't want my machine involved in any of the logistics of getting ads presented to me. I think ads should embedded directly in the content and whatever content providers and advertisers need to do to keep each other honest should be their concern, never the users. That's all they ever should have been allowed to do. Just because they've been able to track users in a creepy kind of way for the past decade or two, doesn't mean it's a good path forward, at least for users. Keeping it local is the least creepy solution, but only if no tracking is not an option and, at least for now, it is.

You say "I think ads should [be] embedded directly in the content .... That's all they ever should have been allowed to do" you seem to be saying "only first party [direct sold, advertisiing brand buys space from publisher and gives publisher an image or video to embed] ads, and no third party tracking or ads". Do I understand you correctly?

The problem is most publishers do not have scale, and (flip side of same coin), together they are too numerous, for publishers to do direct sales to brands of all or even their best ad space (inventory). They must use third parties.

Advertisers, too, want to "buy audience" across many sites, which means tracking in the current ecosystem.

Thus, today, in any of the top browsers that lack ad and tracker blocking, your machine is already deeply involved in "the logistics of getting ads". Almost all ads, even direct sold ones, place via script on page interacting with the main ad server scripts (Google Doubleclick For Publishers [DFP]).

You can't have it both ways: either you need an active user agent that blocks third party cookies and scripts, as Brave and a few others do; or you will have ad logistics running amok on your device, in your browser or webview (which is why we get a 3-7x speed win on Android vs. Chrome). The only path forward is to break the web by blocking third party scripts and trackers. Wishing for publishers to do direct ads as if pasting up ad art on paper won't work.

> BAT Gemini (fall 2017/winter 2018) > KYC (humint + machine learning), rate, and flow control for anti-fraud

Brave - first browser that not only force you to pay for browsing Internet, but also force you to do it with your identity proven. Privacy nightmare.

> there will be no way for Brave Software to correlate your browsing history with payments to your wallet.

At least they are trying to do something about establishing an ad free economy for web content. It's a hard problem but if you think that that is a privacy nightmare you haven't been paying attention to the waking world you live in.

Brave is not forcing anyone to pay for anything (I work at Brave and on the BAT project).

Brave is, and will be free to use.

BAT will be opt-in, and users will not be required to pay for anything.

Users that opt-in when BAT ads become integrated will be awarded BAT from the user growth pool (user growth pool is 300m BATs).

Users that opt-in and wish to remain anonymous do not have to KYC.

Users that choose to exchange BATs for fiat or remove BAT from the system will have to go through KYC if they setup a new wallet as a part of the opt-in.

Again, Brave is not forcing anyone to pay to browse. Brave will continue to block ads and tracking by default, for free. BAT will be integrated and opt-in.

BAT FAQ: https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq.html

BAT blog: User adoption and extending the BAT Platform https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...

BAT white paper: https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...

The usual trouble with micropayments applies - all the interest is from people who want to collect micropayments, not those who want to pay them.

Isn't the end-user the party collecting micropayments in this case?

There are a few pieces to this (I work at Brave and am on the BAT project).

The BAT project has set aside 300M BATs in the User Growth Pool, which will be used to award users that opt-in to the BAT integration with BATs.

Amounts in the user growth pool, including the address, are listed in the BAT FAQ: https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq.html

We also released a post on the user growth pool and extending the BAT Platform beyond the Brave browser, which is continued in the roadmap: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...

The existing Brave Payments beta that uses bitcoin will be migrated to BAT as the roadmap indicates (https://basicattentiontoken.org/bat-roadmap-1-0.html), which will initiate flow for users that choose to opt-in and contribute to verified publishers.

We've posted about this here: https://basicattentiontoken.org/bat-a-natural-way-to-contrib...

The post above also contains a review of the Google Contributor reboot, which filters ads in exchange for micropayments for participating publishers.

As communicated in the roadmap, trials will initially be with ads in private user channels (separate from the current blanner blindness problems that exist - I worked in ad ops and product integration for 5 years prior to joining Brave last Dec - blanner blindness is a problem). Examples: rich push notifications, private tabs, new tab page.

In later phases, verified publishers will be included in the rev share, with additional options for premium content and ala carte content available for BAT for publishers interested in the utility.

That said, verified publishers will be included earlier in the process through the microdonation/patreon option mentioned above.

Right, that's why the advertisers are the ones paying them in this model. Websites and users collect.

And before the car was invented, all the interest in cars were from car makers -- the people just wanted faster horses.

And today, everyone uses the internet, but I doubt you'd find much interest in the internet pre-1990.

I, for one, would love to be able view a well-written article for, say, 10 cents, as opposed to paying for a $300/year subscription.

The use of a blockchain here is going to slow them down... The business model is really interesting but if it ends up working, Google will see it, build a Google Token that doesn't rely on the blockchain, undercut them severely on costs and transfer times, and call it a day.

I don't see Google jumping into this market. Also, it's a lot easier to pay someone in cryptocurrency than in Google token -cryptocurrency is accepted as valid payment in a much more diverse set of places.

The blockchain doesn't need to slow them down if they scale correctly. You'd do most of this stuff through payment channels or a lightning network. And, the lightning network can be made to be cross-chain. You wouldn't even need to pay everyone in bitcoin or ethereum, you could pay them in whatever currency they prefer.

Google wouldn't even need to create a "token", just let you store USD in your Google Wallet and let you cash it out when you want (venmo style). The user already has a way to pay online: their credit card. So: no new merchant integration to build, $0 fees, no security deposit (vs lightning network), no verification documents to submit (crypto exchanges), no network backlog (due to full blocks or ICOs happening).

It would just work.

Lets not forget how many different chat/IM/text applications that Google currently maintains; I'm sure if they had so much as a whim of desire to compete in this market, the MVP is already cooking somewhere on a Googler's hobby lab.

Isn't the BAT/Brave concept a response to what is essentially the same problem as email spam? That is, unwanted/irrelevant advertising at near-zero cost to produce, and that increasingly relies on brute force to overcome countermeasures?

If so, it might be worth evaluating it in terms of the myriads of email spam solutions that have been proposed over the years. Specifically, those solutions based on users adopting different client/server platforms and digital money. Both of which have been shown to be next to impossible to get ordinary people to do as part of their already-established use of the Internet. The general public barely knows what a browser is, much less the concepts involved in a weird new payment system.

its so refreshing to actually see roadmaps after token launches.

BasicPonziToken - The lifeblood of Ethereum

Is it too late to change the name? Something like "Basic Interest Token" (BIT) sounds less Orwellian

Is BAT traded anywhere other than Bittrex and liqui.io yet?

Converting from Bitcoin to an ERC20 token. Bitcoin is going to die; Ethereum is the future.

Even if Ethereum becomes wildly successful and attains the majority of the market share, it could very well result in Bitcoin's absolute value and usage increasing.

How does it help Ethereum users to have a different currency, BAT tokens, bloating up Ethereum's blockchain?

Ethereum is a platform. The more assets use it, the more they can interoperate, and thus the more useful and valuable the platform becomes.

The different currency is the Ethereum users. That's what Ethereum is for, stuff like this.

“from the co-founder of Mozilla”? <checks article> Yep, it’s Brendan Eich.

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