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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

I mean to be fair, there were lots of other such micropayments systems. And some of them are even still running, with very low volume.

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What examples do you have? So far I can think of Steem coin and Dogecoin. The former has the vendor lock-in issue, and the latter has no standardized automation of tipping.

Flattr was probably the most famous. It's still running, last I checked anyway. Readability.com tried something like that as well - remove ads from a site and pay the site owner directly instead. Site owners got very angry about this and it stopped that pretty quickly.

Flattr has recently added recurring subscriptions, though the browser extension obviously still works.

(Not sure if the insert-in-website buttons still do ? They were pretty much killed off anyway after Twitter denied them API access 7 years ago...)

Sure, but Brave and BAT are as painless as it gets:

• you get a grant of BAT to pay content creators on the web, YouTube, Twitter, etc. when you sign up

• Brave can (optionally) automatically allocates BAT to the content creators you visit the most based on the amount of time you spend on their sites

• you can opt-in if you wish to see ads related to things you're interested in and get paid in BAT

• for BAT you earn, you have the option to pay content creators or cashout to fiat (dollars, euros, yen, etc.)

Right now, Uphold is the gateway between earnings in BAT and fiat, but they're also working on integrating with Coinbase as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/cqjv7a/native_c...

Would you mind explaining why any 3rd party coin is more painless then any popular native pay service that does not need additional steps?

What do you mean by native pay services?

Services that work with real money and not over a virtual currency.

The whole point is no money is invoked for the browser user unless they want to go to the frog me of withdrawing the bat they earned. Instead they can just assign it to someone they support

That's what's superior. Real money services require someone to pay real money.

This system could be done without the coin but I bet it would be more difficult to arrange transfer to each browser user.

Like Money services crypto currency services also cost money.

Here is an article about it: https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-much-does-it-cost-buy-...

The biggest thing is you don't have to contribute actual money. Instead of watching the website's intrusive, tracker-ridden ads, you're receiving custom ones from Brave tailored to you based on a local machine learning profile. You're watching ads on your own, separate from the ad networks used by the websites, and so you get a virtual token that can be sent to creators you like. They can convert it to actual cash (you can too if you want).

Creating a virtual currency sounds like a abstraction layer that has no real benefit to me.

As with all of these systems, where it's likely to fall down is that the monetary amount you receive for viewing ads will be so miniscule as to be inconsequential.

How is this more painless than Flattr (2.0) if I'm not interested in ads in the first place?

Brave is supposed to be privacy preserving - neither the site, nor Brave should know which sites you are supporting if I recall correctly.

Oh, so that's what the blockchain does for them ?

I admit that I would hate to see Flattr become a monopolistic payment platform that knows everything abou the websites you visit... but which also seemed inevitable as they have to determine how much to pay to whom ?

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