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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

What does the Brave token do? How many of the browser’s users actually interact with the token? Was the ICO necessary for Brave in any way?

Genuinely asking because it’s the only one of these which could be familiar to someone who’s not deeply into crypto.

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You "earn" BAT by accepting ads via notification. You can then donate this to other sites/creators (at least in theory). I tried it and managed about $25 USD of BAT over the course of a year. The catch is that it's impossible to convert to anything useful. So it's basically just vaporware. I have since stopped that experiment.

The conversion is useful for the advertiser, not the user. The user simply sells their BAT back to the advertiser.

It has inbuilt clients that connect to Tor, IPFS and an ad blocker that can generate a small amount of income just for browsing the web. Their token is used to pay users for receiving adverts. ICO probably wasn't necessary but at the time it was a good way of both marketing and raising money.

Looks like the Brave BAT token trades at 0.29 USD, roughly the same price as five years ago. That seems like a good performance for a 2017 ICO since most of them went to zero.

I wonder how the secondary market works. It’s convenient for Brave to pay you in BAT for watching ads. Then you probably want to convert those BAT earnings to money since this is a token with no obvious reason to appreciate (as the price history shows). Who’s buying ad-earned BAT at 29 cents and why? Does Brave pay for market-making?

The people advertising buy BAT back from the users so they can continue advertising. As ads get served, BAT gets transferred from the advertiser to the user. The user then sells their BAT on an exchange, and advertisers buy it so they can continue advertising.

The most interesting thing about Brave Token is that they can distribute money without knowing bank details. They give you Brave tokens, you cash out through Coinbase. Coinbase needs your identity/bank routing details, but Brave does not.

Someone needs to buy the BAT tokens on Coinbase. Who does that? There doesn’t seem to be an obvious reason for anyone to hold this token.

Is it Brave themselves buying the tokens or paying a market maker? That would complete the loop you describe where the token is simply a way for them to pay semi-anonymously.

The loop is that advertisers acquire BAT (typically by purchasing it for cash from an exchange like Coinbase). That BAT is then distributed to people who view the advertisements, who then sell it back to the advertisers for cash.

Brave does not buy the token or pay any market maker, it's a simple cycle between advertisers and viewers.

i thought i read brave did buy them back from cb, but i dont have a reference handy

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