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Comment by srgseg | Hacker News Reader

Can there ever be a mechanism that prevents people from reverse engineering the protocol to announce to the network that they're viewing ads, so that they can earn BATs for doing nothing? Their incentive would be to use these BATs to pay for premium content. This would undermine the value of BATs and damage the ecosystem.

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You don't really even need to go as far as reverse engineering the protocol to game the system. You can just run as many copies of the browser as you like, each in its own VM, and have scripted mouse/keyboard actions pretending to read content.

Reverse engineering the protocol would probably allow a very resource efficient exploit, but it's far from the only point where the protocol can be corrupted by a user with fraudulent intent.

The protocol would likely not allow BATs to be earned in browsers not properly implementing the protocol (measuring attention on a web page while protecting privacy, etc). And then instances of Brave and any other browser implementing this protocol could easily be cryptographically confirmed to the ad network.

Ha!

In related news, I've figured out a way to totally eliminate automated email spam. It involves replacing SMTP with a new protocol that doesn't allow messages to be delivered unless the sending server cryptographically confirms that a real human pushed the "send" button.

    And then instances of Brave and any other browser
    implementing this protocol could easily be
    cryptographically confirmed to the ad network.

Nevermind adtech, if they've invented tamper-proof remote attestation they should just start selling THAT.

Otherwise, the botnets will all be running code that says "YEP DEFINITELY LEGIT U CAN TRUST ME" on every request.

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