Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

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> someone providing a service now has to do a lot of extra work if they want to get paid, whereas a user who wants to pay someone doesn't

Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.

If your funding method relies on consumers essentially donating their money to you, it's extremely important to make that experience as seamless for them as possible. Patreon is great, but it does require users to go out of their way and make a conscious decision to fund _you_ specifically. That's a lot of extra effort that person has to go through just to give their money away to a random site they happened to visit for a couple hours that month.

With this system however the user just signs up for a single service _once_ and subscribes, and that's the full extent their involvement. The trade-off is that the content creator is now the one who has to go through the extra effort of setting up an account on this service, but unlike content consumers, the creator actually has an incentive to go through that process (free money) which makes it worthwhile for them.

>Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.

And my point is that such a system is unsustainable, due to asymmetry of work.

Lets start with a few things that we can know are true:

1. In any system of patrons and artists, an artist will have more patrons than a patron has artists, or the system is unsustainable.

2. I could create a competitor to Brave, "Fearful", tomorrow. So could anyone else.

As a creator, its possible that every single patron of mine will pay me through a different service, I then need to register myself in all of them, and either manually, or via a middleman, convert the disparate currencies to my preferred one. But, because there are so many different payment methods, its likely that the long tail isn't worth my time to receive payment from. Systems that accept payment on behalf of someone else and require work on the part of that party to receive the payment create this loss.

On the other hand, even if every creator has their own payment platform, there's no loss. Patrons simply don't pay the long tail of the creators that they use, and instead only make payments to the ones they appreciate the most.

iow, asymmetry means that creator-focused services are the only ones that can be successful except for very niche groups. So, if your goal is to support blockchain tech, Brave is great. If on the other hand, your goal is to get paid by patrons, its not.

So your concern is the inefficiencies introduced by creators who never claim their cash?

If the tokens were automatically returned to the consumer after a period of, for example, 6 months or so, and redistributed to creators via the usual method, would that alleviate your concerns?

Some, although not all. My concern is that doing that shouldn't be possible if the platform is decentralized.

Of course it's possible. Etherium, for example, would make that sort of thing trivial.

BAT white paper and roadmap aim at full decentralization. Ethereum is not ready yet, either on scalability or anonymity via ZKP. We're working in phases using ZKP off chain accounting and single-monthly-transaction on, no fingerprint of users or their supported sites.

The token is an Ethereum token, so it's totally possible to do it in a decentralized way using a smart contract.

We're moving this into a whole new realm of problem then. Ethereum smart contracts have been shown as at the very least possible to get wrong by coding incorrectly, at this point multiple times.

I'm not sure taking a straightforward and easily reasoned about process that the courts could easily handle and moving it to something enforced by a programming language subject to bugs that are largely unable to be handled by courts is necessarily a step in the right direction. At least not until there's a lot more vetting of Ethereum and a much better and more secure ecosystem to call upon.

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