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Comment by andersriutta | Hacker News Reader

Initially, Brave was set up so a user could add bitcoins to an account and set a monthly spending target. Then Brave would split up that monthly amount and send it to sites based on how much time the user spent at each site. But as far as I can tell, they discontinued that model, and now they also sell ads.

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Just to back up your (currently downvoted) comment:

"[Brave] browser blocks ads and website trackers. Currently, the company is developing a feature that allows users to opt in to receiving ads sold by Brave Software in place of the blocked ads. Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software, ad partners, and browser users would each be allocated 15% of the revenue. Users could donate their revenue share to bloggers and other providers of web content through micropayments. The browser claims to improve online privacy by sharing less data with advertising customers, but will target web ads by analyzing users' anonymized browsing history." -- Wikipedia

I consider this ad-replacement scheme extraordinarily scummy. It sounds like the plan is to use protection racket strategies to get the target publishers to buy in.

I'm on the latest version of the browser, and there's a "Payments" tab in Settings where you can add funds with BTC / ETH / BAT / LTC, set monthly budgets, and see what your percentage is. So I'm not sure where you saw that they discontinued that feature or sell ads.

I am guessing they will replace it by the following feature :

Support your favorite sites with Brave’s blockchain-based tokens called Basic Attention Tokens. (coming soon to mobile)

https://brave.com/features/

Yeah, they replaced the "Bitcoin proof-of-concept system" [0,1] with BAT for "blockchain-based digital advertising" [2].

[0] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1036724148146384896 [1] https://brave.com/faq-payments/#previous-bitcoin-wallet [2] https://basicattentiontoken.org/

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