Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I refuse to accept that ads are the only way for content creators to make a living online. It's not the first time that the cryptocurrency crowd sees a problem and thinks "clearly the blockchain is the solution here". Except that behind buzzwords and vague assertions I fail to see a coherent big picture of how that's all going to work. Instead of giving me Internet Fun Bucks to watch ads, how about you let me pay for your service?

I pay for Spotify, I pay for Memrize, I pay for Tarnsap, I bought a Fontawesome subscription last friday, I used to donate to a couple Patreons. I donate punctually to FreeBSD, Wikipedia and a few other open source projects. I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to prostitute my private life to do it.

If content creators don't want my money but insist that I should let them spam me with ads and share my private info with third parties then it's their problem, not mine.

Life is too short for me to curate "cryptographic interest tokens" in order for advertisers to serve me content that I don't want to see anyway.

Some cryptocurrency projects wanted to develop a cheap and easy micropayment system. That seems a lot more interesting to me although that probably can't work as long as the "currency" part of "cryptocurrency" remains more aspirational than practical.

But this is exactly what they try to achieve! There are so many creators that don't have regular content worth subscription or patreon. They might be doing one quality blogpost a month or a year. For them ads were only way how to monetize the content somehow.

BAT is trying to change that - instead of ads you put money into Brave and pay those tiny amounts to creators directly. The idea is that you might not even know that you often read some blog and the browser distribute BAT for you (if you want).

Honestly it is not about the cryptocurrency hype at all. Like everybody wanted some legit usecase for crypto and now when there is one then people hate it because it is crypto...

Oh but that does sound interesting, I just wasn't aware of this before this discussion so that was actually quite insightful for me.

I'm still not really considering switching to Brave but if this BAT thing makes it into Firefox (as an extension for instance) I'll probably give it a try.

I remain unconvinced that decentralized blockchains can really scale up to the number of transactions that would be generated by everybody "tipping" individual website as they browse them but that's a different issue.

Oh i fully agree on the crypto part. The scaling is big issue and it could get inefficient financially. I think it was the most straightforward way how to do private transactions without them being fintech company with all the requirements. It is sort of MVP. If they start to have scaling issues they will have time to tackle those.

They also don't have to make the transactions instant. They are basically donations so the transaction time does not really matter. They could spread the transactions for efficiency.

Plus crypto is evolving and they are counting on it. When their scaling issues come there might very well be some ok solution in likes of lightning network. Or doing stuff offchain.

For me Brave is actually secondary browser now because it is the "ungoogled chrome" that is easy to install and i can test webwork i do without chrome.

>. I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to prostitute my private life to do it.

You don't have to, just don't opt-in for Brave rewards (aka ads), and fund your tipping wallet with your money (you can as of today) and voilà !

You'll have:

- No ads, no trackers

- You contribute toward content creators with your cash like you do with Spotify/Netflix using a built-in wallet in your browser

- A fast and privacy-first browser

That does sound a lot more like something I would use. Do the Brave folks get a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer using a cryptocurrency network? If it's the latter what's Brave's business model, they just have a whole bunch of BAT and bet on them gaining value through adoption and deflation?

Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.

>Do the Brave folks get a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer using a cryptocurrency network?

No, they don't take a cut if you fund your wallet directly and use it to tip the content creators.

>If it's the latter what's Brave's business model

Here is how they make money, just pasting my comment from below:

By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse.

Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens

Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers)

So the Ads / Get paid to browse part of Brave is 100% optional and opt-in, many people think it is mandatory

>Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.

Yeah, I'm kinda fascinated about Brave's model, I'm wondering if it will be the first cryptocurrency-based solution that make sense to me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software 15% Brave ad partners 15% Browser users 15% of the revenue.

So roughly 30%

Thank you for correcting me! I wrote the numbers that were on top of my head

That sounds ideal. How do I fund my tipping wallet. I can't see anything about it in the Brave desktop brower's UI.

Click on the settings button on the top right --> Brave rewards --> add funds

Yeah but it's like cable tv. You would pay a quarter to watch an episode but they want $10 a month. There is no piecemeal solution yet and crypto is not a real solution yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com