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Comment by fenwick67 | Hacker News Reader

"Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible."

So people can pay to buy tokens but can't sell them, seems legit.

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You can buy and sell them on exchanges like Coinbase. It'd probably be a bad idea for Brave to get into the cryptocurrency exchange business - it's a tricky business, and it's not their core competency.

Personally, BAT is unappealing to me anyway. Cryptocurrency looks to be a hassle I could do without.

Also Coinbase is giving away 10 U$ worth of BAT if you look at the videos about Brave and reply to questions in a test correctly.

Actually people can buy and sell BAT.

They just can't convert any BAT rewarded for ad participation into fiat right now.

It's on the roadmap though, but even then you'll have to go through KYC AML providers so there'll be no option of anonymous earnings.

They can't just pay BAT directly out to an address and bypass KYC by not providing an exchange?

Would seem a really stupid move...

Is BAT trackable? (I think it's an Ethereum token right, thus trackable?)

When BAT is paid out to people surfing the web, does someone knows what ads they saw, maybe what webpages they visited to see those ads?

BAT activity for user rewards etc happens off-chain at the moment, but I think the plan is to move it all on-chain when Ethereum can support that level of activity.

A user model is built on-device to allow for opt-in targeted ads, but that model does not leak across the wire.

Because the user model is not bound by a security sandbox, it can build a much richer model of user behaviour than even the most invasive ad-tech solutions that exist right now.

So Brave claims end-users get more relevant, targeted ads and more privacy, because this model can't be accessed off-device.

It sounds good in theory, and now ads are live we'll get to see how true it is in practice.

Re first question: That is correct. BAT is trackable as are all Ethereum tokens. But Ethereum 2.0 is planned to allow much more powerful privacy features, so it's not clear what choices BAT will make when the option is available.

Unfortunately, MLMs are legal, and since a service is being done for pay (ads count as a 'service') then this is probably legit.

But I thought the point of Brave was to pay content authors. Wouldn't a simpler and more consistent solution be to make it so that if a viewer received a payment for viewing ads (man that is hard to type) that the money is held in escrow until they pay it out to a site the user has visited?]

That's the basic setup of the Brave browser. You get shown a few Brave ads every so often and you can automatically "tip" sites by setting your preferences. It's kind of like Spotify where whatever you "earn" during a month gets distributed based on the amount of time you spend on a site. You can also not tip anyone but the Brave tokens expire after a while for the end-user if not used. This is just my understanding from using the Brave browser. I should note that I'm working for a startup in this space that is pursuing a different model but I support any and all efforts to put the Internet economy back in the hands of creators and average people.

But then they can't use the payment for viewing ads and unclaimed tips for marketing their own product...

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