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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

I find the default brave values to be very good. Its almost the best browser in terms of privacy protections by default, only battered by librewolf which breaks a ton of sites(1)

And with brave search, you have good search and a good browser too.

1. https://privacytests.org

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I've been using Brave as my primary browser now for at least four years, and it breaks very few web sites these days. I still have to revert to another browser every once in a while (less than once a month). The Brave experience has made using any other browser painful... Whenever I open a familiar site in a different browser where Brave isn't available (work) it's a jarring and dissonant shock. So many annoying ads everywhere all of a sudden! The crypto stuff I just ignore.

I never really understood the crypto stuff. BAT isn't mined on the computers of people who use brave, right? so why is it even a cryptocurrency at all, couldn't they just essentially use a non-coin solution? aka a bunch of integers in a sql database

I never cared about BAT, I just realized its was centralized on top of ETH and then just stopped caring.

I immediately disable it and anything related to crypto and I just forget about it.

The official story is that Brave runs a revenue share program, so if they wanted to use "real money" they would have to be a licensed money transmitter. To sidestep the regulatory issue, it is much easier to use a cryptocurrency for the payout and punt all the KYC/AML requirements to a crypto exchange.

"Why BAT and not just use another existing crypto?" Well, they tried! They started with Bitcoin, but no one wanted to use BTC to tip or contribute, which is kind of a problem if you want to build an alternative monetization strategy for content creators.

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