Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
How do you tip $.0035 for a tweet?
Saying I earned 0.00045 BAT is fun, but doesn’t actually help me with anything until I convert it to dollars anyway.
BAT can also be used for paywalls, VPN payments, pay-per-view streaming and other smallish transactions. As the BAT ecosystem grows, there will be more incentive to transact in BAT, so there’s not so much of a need to convert to fiat.
BTW, BAT is up nearly 8% as I write this, presumably on the news of the Brave 1.0 release. There’s a decent chance that BAT is worth significantly more 2 or 3 years now; we’re still in the early days.
Finally, because BAT uses the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard, it automatically interoperates with the Ethereum ecosystem, including being able to be converted to other ERC-20 tokens, including stablecoins like PAX and GUSD, which are designed to always be valued at $1 per share, kinda like a money market fund.
You only need one transfer for each user and one transfer for each content producer. You don't need and/or want the O(n^2) cross product transfers.
They don't currently integrate with a payment provider, and if they did they'd have to deal with that provider shutting off payments due to pressure from governments looking to censor content. They'd also have to generate income tax documents in a wide variety of jurisdictions.
Doing the kind of business worldwide where you pay people in fiat (rather than just get paid) is a tremendous undertaking. Even Google hasn't managed to pull it off worldwide just yet:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
How about if you're a content creator who got paid in these ever-volatile digital currency units...instead of dollars? If those same creators instantly traded out for $, what was their trading fees? Is all of this something to consider when singing the praises of saving a few pennies on transaction costs?
> saving a few pennies on transaction costs
The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.
As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?
The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.
This is just pushing the problem one step removed.
Is it not only relevant what you trade for your groceries?
If you can find someone to take BAT for that, in stable exchange rates, then your point stands.
If you have to acquire $ then what the exchange rate is for $ to BAT comes back into relevance.
Again, perpetually trading BAT back and forth for showing ads/watching ads is restating my premise about holding BAT.
Whether people will be willing to do so greatly depends on exchange rates and volatility.
If you're making that purchase, you might as well time it with a down-swing in the price (or away from an up-swing). Some users will spend more cycles on timing their buys than others, and those users will have a stabilizing effect on the price.
Also, the price of BAT in USD over the last 60 days has stayed between 0.12 and 0.24... it's not exactly as crazy as you're making it out to be.
I would much prefer to just give brave my CC details, regardless of what internal currency they’re using for rewarding content.
Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also the service time. Most service won't let you take it out until your cash reach an high limit. With a concurrency, at worse you can keep using it in other alternative ways (at a bare minimum, on your web browsing in this case).
Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.
Most exchange won't let you cash out over small amounts, but you can still exchange it. You aren't subject to fluctuation if it's already exchanged.
It's so weird the amount of misinformation here... I know that people here may hate cryptocurrencies, but it's the same thing as having it stored somewhere in a DB. The only difference is that you can actually do something with it.
Nothing stop you from exchanging it as soon as you can.
If the website would be offering USD instead of BAT, you would still not be able to retrieve it until it reach a amount big enough to take out (Google Ads is at 100$, 25$ for international user on Patreon). Until it's actual USD in your bank account, it's not better than BAT and depends on the existence of the service. The difference is that BAT, you can still use it if you decide to, right now.
Sure, but even with an inflation rate of 2%, if you hold USD for 10 years, its purchasing power is cut in half.
Every BAT token that’s ever going to exist has already been minted, so it can’t be inflated by creating more of it. There will be no quantitive easing, “too big to fail” or bailouts in the BAT ecosystem.
That almost certainly will not be the case for either the dollar or the Euro.
So what will be the purchasing power of BAT in 10 years?
Given that there’s no doubt there will be at least one financial crash with the dollar and other fiat currencies, there’s a more than decent chance BAT will outperform the dollar in the next 10 years, which frankly, wouldn't be too difficult.
Give me real money every day, I'm happy to pay a small fee in order to not have to deal with the hive of scum and villainy that is the cryptocurrency market.