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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

>If I give you a cryptographic representation of my interests you can serve me ads without having to know the intimate details of my life. You only need to know how to deal with the token.

>What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens at different times.

I'm really perplex. People who care enough about their privacy to make use of something like that are probably those who don't want ads or tracking at all anyway. The rest of the population obviously doesn't care.

I personally can't imagine ever willingly enabling ads in my browser. You want me to pay for your service? Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you. If you prefer to beg for me to turn my ad blocker off then be my guest but I won't do it.

The idea of installing Brave, curating several "tokens" containing my interests and selecting what to send to which website is frankly preposterous to me and of dubious value for the advertisers.

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Well you should maybe think about the content creators. If they live off the ads then you just killed their living. Bat is about micro transactions - you load Brave with 20usd and leave it to distribute money. It is actually great usecase for crypto. I doubt you want to be giving out your credit card to sites you read and micro transaction services would also invade your privacy by paying for you. All crypto is not bad and BAT is pretty legit in my opinion.

I refuse to accept that ads are the only way for content creators to make a living online. It's not the first time that the cryptocurrency crowd sees a problem and thinks "clearly the blockchain is the solution here". Except that behind buzzwords and vague assertions I fail to see a coherent big picture of how that's all going to work. Instead of giving me Internet Fun Bucks to watch ads, how about you let me pay for your service?

I pay for Spotify, I pay for Memrize, I pay for Tarnsap, I bought a Fontawesome subscription last friday, I used to donate to a couple Patreons. I donate punctually to FreeBSD, Wikipedia and a few other open source projects. I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to prostitute my private life to do it.

If content creators don't want my money but insist that I should let them spam me with ads and share my private info with third parties then it's their problem, not mine.

Life is too short for me to curate "cryptographic interest tokens" in order for advertisers to serve me content that I don't want to see anyway.

Some cryptocurrency projects wanted to develop a cheap and easy micropayment system. That seems a lot more interesting to me although that probably can't work as long as the "currency" part of "cryptocurrency" remains more aspirational than practical.

>. I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to prostitute my private life to do it.

You don't have to, just don't opt-in for Brave rewards (aka ads), and fund your tipping wallet with your money (you can as of today) and voilà !

You'll have:

- No ads, no trackers

- You contribute toward content creators with your cash like you do with Spotify/Netflix using a built-in wallet in your browser

- A fast and privacy-first browser

That sounds ideal. How do I fund my tipping wallet. I can't see anything about it in the Brave desktop brower's UI.

Click on the settings button on the top right --> Brave rewards --> add funds

That does sound a lot more like something I would use. Do the Brave folks get a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer using a cryptocurrency network? If it's the latter what's Brave's business model, they just have a whole bunch of BAT and bet on them gaining value through adoption and deflation?

Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.

>Do the Brave folks get a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer using a cryptocurrency network?

No, they don't take a cut if you fund your wallet directly and use it to tip the content creators.

>If it's the latter what's Brave's business model

Here is how they make money, just pasting my comment from below:

By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse.

Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens

Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers)

So the Ads / Get paid to browse part of Brave is 100% optional and opt-in, many people think it is mandatory

>Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.

Yeah, I'm kinda fascinated about Brave's model, I'm wondering if it will be the first cryptocurrency-based solution that make sense to me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software 15% Brave ad partners 15% Browser users 15% of the revenue.

So roughly 30%

Thank you for correcting me! I wrote the numbers that were on top of my head

Yeah but it's like cable tv. You would pay a quarter to watch an episode but they want $10 a month. There is no piecemeal solution yet and crypto is not a real solution yet.

But this is exactly what they try to achieve! There are so many creators that don't have regular content worth subscription or patreon. They might be doing one quality blogpost a month or a year. For them ads were only way how to monetize the content somehow.

BAT is trying to change that - instead of ads you put money into Brave and pay those tiny amounts to creators directly. The idea is that you might not even know that you often read some blog and the browser distribute BAT for you (if you want).

Honestly it is not about the cryptocurrency hype at all. Like everybody wanted some legit usecase for crypto and now when there is one then people hate it because it is crypto...

Oh but that does sound interesting, I just wasn't aware of this before this discussion so that was actually quite insightful for me.

I'm still not really considering switching to Brave but if this BAT thing makes it into Firefox (as an extension for instance) I'll probably give it a try.

I remain unconvinced that decentralized blockchains can really scale up to the number of transactions that would be generated by everybody "tipping" individual website as they browse them but that's a different issue.

Oh i fully agree on the crypto part. The scaling is big issue and it could get inefficient financially. I think it was the most straightforward way how to do private transactions without them being fintech company with all the requirements. It is sort of MVP. If they start to have scaling issues they will have time to tackle those.

They also don't have to make the transactions instant. They are basically donations so the transaction time does not really matter. They could spread the transactions for efficiency.

Plus crypto is evolving and they are counting on it. When their scaling issues come there might very well be some ok solution in likes of lightning network. Or doing stuff offchain.

For me Brave is actually secondary browser now because it is the "ungoogled chrome" that is easy to install and i can test webwork i do without chrome.

I feel for them, but ads are just too annoying, intrusive, and possibly malicious for me to willingly disable my adblocker unless they are promising curated ads. The web is already a pretty terrible experience these days, but it's downright painful without an ad blocker.

I’m thinking about the content creators, they have a warm spot in my heart, but it’s not my job to figure out their business model for them. They sent me their web page, and I get to choose how it’s presented - otherwise, I have no control over my own computer. So I choose to enjoy it without ads - ads which often track you, install malware, or act in bad faith in other ways.

If that ruins their business model, they need to figure out how to collect payment before sending me the web page. Don’t freely send OTA TV signals into my house then get offended when I decide to skip the ads. Same thing.

I think a lot of sites have already figured this out. They sell t-shirts. Mugs. Premium podcast episodes, and Patreon sponsorships. The Web is working around this as we speak. But the Googles of the world will make it sound like we’re “stealing web pages”. This will be “the new piracy”. All to defend a business model that relies on my equipment assaulting me with your malicious ads on your behalf. No thank you.

> I personally can't imagine ever willingly enabling ads in my browser.

I have a really hard time reconciling this opinion with "Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you."

Even with ad blockers, I have much more control what information I give out than if I trust someone with my credit card number.

Even if the content creator is genuine, there have been so many hacks in the past.

Credit cards are also not good for microtransactions and BAT is a potentially enabler for them. Sure, we aren't there yet but it doesn't look as impossible as it were in 1999 when microtransactions came up the first time as a solution to the ads problem.

If an idea is preposterous to you then fair enough the status quo sounds like a fit for your needs and you are free to stick with it. I'm old enough to remember the time when the World Wide Web and electric self-driving cars were dismissed as preposterous.

For me, I like the idea of paying for content without having to supply my credit card number to each news outlet that I want to read. With no link to me directly the websites no longer need to track me and Brave can go out of it's way to back that up. No need to curate tokens. Just switch profiles if/when you need to.

BTW you don't _need_ to see any ads at all. You can instead just buy BATs and use them for content payment without ads.

Its not several tokens, its just use of the BAT token

User experience aside it makes it clear when you revoke permission to your data

You can point to the public transaction where you did that and show consent to that advertiser and whoever they copied that data to, massive liability for them if they arent playing along

A step towards cooperation, not a cure all

Tokens are also useful in bootstrapping any two sided marketplace, and people would also be aligned in seeing it become more valuable. To you, that means damning unobjectiveness, to others that means necessary skin in the game to know what theyre talking about.

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