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Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO
- wehadfun 9y agoMore details please
- porter 9y agoYou can download the Brave private browser at www.brave.com. The Brave browser automatically disables all ads and tracking when you browse any website. The founder of Brave also created JavaScript.
- pacaro 9y agoI think it's ok to name Brendan Eich here. Just saying "[person who] created JavaScript" makes me think "that's either Brendan Eich or someone lying about having created JavaScript" If he's chosen to be the CEO of a company again, then he's also chosen to put his social/political views on equality into the public sphere again.
- chews 9y agopolitical/social views? Isn't this an ICO discussion?
- austincheney 9y agoHe never did that before when at Mozilla.
- pacaro 9y agoA political donation is an act of public speech. I think it's ok to care about the beliefs and views of the officers and board members of a company.
- austincheney 9y agoHis hazing and firing from Mozilla really sounded like a concession favoring discrimination.
- pacaro 9y agoWhen you stand in a position of power and privilege, then your responsibilities are (or should be) commensurately greater
- austincheney 9y agoThat is not an excuse to discriminate against people for having different opinions than you.
- bpicolo 9y ago> automatically disables all ads Except the ads they're planning on showing?
- terhechte 9y agoThat's opt-in, and you'd be paid for seeing them.
- gcp 9y agoMore crucially: the tokens sold here allow advertisers to show ads to users of the Brave browser.
- BrendanEich 9y agoOpt-in BAT ads. Like the bitcoin-based anonymous auto-microdonations in Brave Payments in beta-testing form today. We'll work to prototype and then propagate the BAT to other attention-based apps (browsers, games, video-players, and messengers).
- ummjackson 9y agoHa, the top 100 holders own ~99% of the total token supply. Really poorly executed distribution model: https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/BAT https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/BAT
- wand3r 9y agoYou seem to imply this is a bad thing (for Brave) and this wasn't intentional.
- dna_polymerase 9y agoWell there are only 190 holders. Far worse: 4 of them hold >50%
- ummjackson 9y agoYup, fail whale.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gcp 9y agoWhat's the consequence, though? Brave got $35M, unless Ethereum crashes very soon. Some parties can now set the price for advertising within Brave to whatever they want. If Brave becomes popular, they become rich. If Brave fails, they lost their money.
- oh_sigh 9y agoRight...this sounds like a good thing. People with big money invested will presumably want to set their prices such that Brave will succeed and they will either get a return or at least not lose their shirt. If, for example, tens of thousands of people only had tens of dollars invested, they may be less interested in making Brave a successful platform because they have little financial incentive and little to lose.
- iamacynic 9y ago
- conradk 9y agoIs this expected to affect the market for ETH ? And if so, by how much ?
- the_common_man 9y agoWhat exactly does this mean? Brave raised $35m? I find that hard to believe but wow if that's true.
- Sammi 9y agoAnd what are these tokens that are mentioned?
- dharma1 9y agohttps://basicattentiontoken.org/token/index.html https://basicattentiontoken.org/token/index.html
- gcp 9y agoThey sold off tokens which give access to advertising space in their browser, though the Etherium blockchain, and for a set amount of tokens per ETH. So they now own 35M worth of ETH, and a few entities have near-exclusive access to advertising inside Brave (but can also sell those tokens off).
- jcousins 9y agoThey conducted an ERC20 token sale on the Ethereum network. It sold out in seconds. The tokens (BAT - Basic Attention Token) are to be used to buy advertising in the "attention economy." The premise is really interesting, but the dynamics of the Ethereum token sale space are borderline insanity at the moment, and will continue to be until most of the fools are parted with their ether either by a company that fails or turns into a scam.
- MarkPNeyer 9y agoWhen Mt. Fox failed, nobody called for more regulation of bitcoin exchanges. I think many people have decided that regulation just ends up benefitting the established players at this point.
- dsun178 9y agoI still belief ICOs are made up to launder crypto-money. Invest anonymous into your own ICO, ed voila, the money is clean to use.
- DennisP 9y agoThat'd be a decent strategy for drug dealers hoping to legitimize their earnings, but I don't think there are any drug markets taking ETH yet; most of the drug profits are in BTC. It'd be pretty hard to exchange millions of dollars' worth of BTC to ETH in a purely anonymous way, so I doubt that the massive ETH raises have criminal sources. Also I sorta doubt that Brendan Eich is a drug dealer :)
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoIn-app purchases are a decent alternative. Give a mule some BTC, mule buys premium currency in your shitty game, your shitty game company sells the BTC it "acquired" on the open market. Either way, you've got income from selling digital goods for cryptocurrency, rather than cryptocurrency with no socially accepted narrative for possessing it.
- vikingyc 9y agoCan you explain a bit more on how does it work? I heard this two times in past week here. Thx.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThe more traditional route converts dirty USD into game company revenue. Step one is recruiting some people to be a "customer" of your game. You give them $500 of dirty money, they go visit various retail establishments and buy $450 worth of pre-paid cards, then spend the balances on those pre-paid cards buying stuff from your game. Various banking institutions and app marketplace owners take their cuts, you wind up with clean money earned from selling premium coins to your "customers", which you then report as taxable income and use for whatever legal-market purposes you want. So, the short of it is that it's a two-part scheme. Part 1 converts undocumented cash into pre-paid debit cards. Part 2 converts the balance of those cards into business income from selling digital goods. The receipt of cash gets offloaded to retail establishments that routinely handle such transactions. The delivery of goods is cheap and verifiable, and the payment for those goods goes through legitimate channels. Compare to laundering money through a literal laundromat. If you double the sales through putting dirty money into the laundromat's cash deposits, you ought to be using twice as much power and water. Auditors can find that out. Selling twice as many virtual battleships, though? You've got customer accounts you've "delivered goods" to.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWhat's ICO? Initial Coin Offering?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ada1981 9y agoyes.
- cslarson 9y agoIn the end this was a fail for BAT. Sure they got the money, but what would have been more valuable would have been a massive bunch of new incentivised users.
- Cshelton 9y agoAll these ICO's have been avoiding any SEC regulation regarding private security sales by claiming the tokens are just a method to use/exchange services on their platform, not as an investment. However, when ICO's like this one keep happening where only 100 "accounts" own 99% of the ICO offering, you pretty much lose that argument of the tokens only being there for use of the platform. It's a private security sale, and I only see one way this will end. The SEC will make a case out of one of the ICO's 100%. They do not take advertising to unaccredited investors lightly. My only suggestion, if you are involved in any way with an ICO (developer, investor on the team pre-ICO, etc.), either get out of the U.S. now and/or make sure all operations are happening outside the U.S. I was almost involved with a company doing essentially what these ICO's are doing (not blockchain/crypto currencies), and fortunately I figured it out before being involved, but it did not end pretty for them. Like the IRS, the SEC/others will come down hard, not a matter of if at this point, it's when and who gets the beating first. They love making cases out of someone to set precedent. With the general public playing into an overbought token market fueled by Asian countries for the most part, the regulators/SEC will come down extremely hard on this. I think investing in Ethereum/Bitcoin is fine, just know what you're doing, record your cost basis for when you bought it. And seeing first hand what the IRS does to people who avoid paying taxes, just make your life easy, when you exchange back to a currency that is considered a currency by the IRS, just pay your capital gains on it and move on with life. The IRS will catch up and many people will go to jail for tax evasion. Don't be one of them. Obviously, all this only pertains to the U.S.. Also for fun, if you really want to see the hysteria around the Ethereum price right now, check out r/ethtrader/ or even the Ethereum FB group. People are throwing their entire savings into this while not knowing anything about it besides everyone in the group hyping it up amongst themselves. It's really sad. Ethereum is now actively pumped heavily on MLM sites/blogs. It's beyond gross. I believe Ethereum is an amazing project and am worried that this hype fueled hysteria, once it collapses on itself, will give Ethereum a bad reputation. It is a great protocol.
- seibelj 9y agoBut if you own a token, you own nothing in the company, no equity, no promises, no contract signed, you don't have any right to any profits and Brave can say tomorrow that all the tokens are worthless. It's not so straight-forward that they raised investment, really they sold $35mil of a product. But IANAL, and you could easily be right, I'm just saying it isn't so cut and dry.
- edaemon 9y agoWhat's the incentive for a user to switch to the Brave browser? What advantages does it have over a different browser using ad- and tracker-blocking plugins, especially now that the Brave browser allows ads from these ad providers?
- altern8tif 9y agoAside from the built-in ad-blocking/privacy features, Brave also allows you to pay publishers you support through their payment system. It seems that with this ICO, Brave users can also start earning tokens (ie. Basic Attention Tokens) when choosing to view ads on certain publishers' websites. If I'm not mistaken, this new model is targeted to launch by the end of 2017. http://www.coindesk.com/web-browser-brave-to-launch-ico-for-ethereum-ad-token/ http://www.coindesk.com/web-browser-brave-to-launch-ico-for-...
- mayneack 9y agoIt works well on mobile.
- solotronics 9y agoI use Brave on Android almost exclusively. Its built on Chromium with built in ad blocking.
- mdeeks 9y agoStrongly seconding this. Finding Brave on Android was a huge moment for me. The mobile web is downright unusable on Chrome in Android and there are no good non-root options for ad blocking. Firefox is dog slow (sorry FF), Opera crashes on me regularly, and I don't really trust any of the other 3rd party browsers. Brave is basically Chrome with ad blocking. URL for the lazy: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
- thebiglebrewski 9y agoLol, nobody understands what really happened here. Myself included! They used some kind of digital currency to purchase shares in an upcoming venture? I'd love to try to explain this to my grandma
- tenaciousDaniel 9y agoI'm a software engineer and I can barely explain it to myself.
- thebiglebrewski 9y agoHaha right
- mason55 9y agoThe idea is that the Brave platform will allow users to send micropayments to content publishers. The micropayments will be in the form of "Brave Coins" which are like Bitcoins but specific to the Brave platform. The reason for this is that you reduce transaction costs to a point where it makes sense to send a $0.50 (or whatever) payment. So if the Brave platform succeeds then you'll have a whole bunch of people who want to exchange cash for these "Brave Coins" so they can send micropayments. These early investors will hold all the Brave Coins and so they will get the initial influx of cash from people buying Brave Coins to use the platform. Edit: Possibly the coins are being used by advertisers on the platform, not for micropayments.
- altern8tif 9y agoMy understanding is that the tokens (BAT) are sold to/for advertisers to allow them to purchase advertising on the Brave platform so that they can advertise on specific publishers' websites. The tokens paid for by the advertisers will then go into the pockets of these publishers, while a small portion will end up with users to compensate them for their attention spent viewing those ads. Am I reading it wrong?
- 9y ago
- billconan 9y agohow does a fund raiser (ICO issuer) pay back investors?
- seibelj 9y agoIf I was a VC, I would be pooping myself. Quick, get on the phone with your old college buddies at the SEC / IRS, and stop this right now! The whole VC model is going to implode if companies can raise money like this. No equity, no dilution, no kissing ass... MADNESS
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoPlus, I don't really see any reason to be impressed by "the founder also created JavaScript". That's just like saying "the founder is a famous fuck-up whose legacy has made you suffer".
- chongli 9y agoRead the history of JavaScript sometime. It's not his fault that the language has so many flaws. He had 10 days to create it [0]! If he'd been given a normal budget and schedule and free license to design the language, we might've had something more like Scheme [1]. [0] https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_JavaScript https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoI'm familiar with the history of JavaScript. I still blame Brendan for not speaking up about how stupid it was to design and ship a new programming language in 10 days. Then there's the homophobe thing. Then there's the replacing ads on websites with his own (since rolled back). Eich's name on your project is not something to be proud of. I give Brave some credit for at least being open source, compared to the likes of Vivaldi. At the same time, -1 to built-in integrations with proprietary password managers.
- pacaro 9y agoAround the same time, I added a scripting language to a complex desktop app. My initial prototype just used SIOD [1], but my boss took one look at it and told me to think again, that our customers would never accept having to use a lisp to script the application. I ended up using the VARIANT type heavily (this was on win16), leaning on OLE automation, and building something with C syntax and modules. No first class functions, no prototype object model. :( [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIOD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIOD
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cellis 9y agoCould someone explain this to me like I'm five? I have an understanding of blockchain, kinda. What is this ICO?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pacaro 9y agoThis is my understanding Put aside blockchain, ICO, and browsers for a moment. Imagine an app that shows ads, nothing more. The users of the app are credited in tokens for viewing and/or clicking ads. The advertisers pay tokens to show ads. There is a middleman (presumably brave) who manages the ad marketplace and distribution (for a cut) The users can then take their tokens (acquired viewing ads) and sell them on the open market, ultimately to further advertisers. The tokens become a CPM backed currency. The ICO is how you create an initial pool of tokens and establish an initial value. Blockchain is used as a clearing house and ledger of transactions. Brave happen to be using a browser as the vehicle for ads.
- soared 9y agoAnd to make it more interesting... An average CPM is $2 (2 dollars for 1000 impressions). If you use the internet for an hour you likely generated ~200 impressions. You could in theory earn about $1 a day for casually using the internet (after Brave's/others' cut).
- sanswork 9y agoBraves traffic would be considered incentivized so no way it is making $2/cpm.
- harryh 9y agoWhat prevents Brave from, instead of requiring these BAT tokens to show advertising on their network, just deciding to charge $ instead? If/when they do that won't it make these tokens worthless?
- arcaster 9y agoIt's great that only 5 actors control a majority of the value LMAO. Even Gnosis handled their roll-out more gracefully than the BAT team.
- phamilton 9y agoOstensibly, the tokens here are representative of future services on the platform. Is this just a fancy kickstarter? Was Tesla's model 3 preorder basically the same thing? They raised $400M dollars ($1000 down payment on 400k reservations) on future sales of a product not yet built.
- eridius 9y agoIf Tesla fails to deliver the Model 3, I assume they'd need to refund the down payments for all the pre-orders. Similarly, Kickstarter's rules say if the kickstarter is funded but then fails to deliver, they must refund the money (though I have no idea how well-enforced this actually is). Meanwhile, if Brave completely fails and the BATs become worthless, I don't think anybody's going to get refunded.
- greglindahl 9y agoTesla's deposits can be refunded for any reason up until the car starts being produced. So all of those Model 3 reservations are refundable. And some people who wanted for a long time in the queue for Model S or Model X changed their minds (or got tired of waiting) and got refunds.
- RichardHeart 9y agoIf the only thing you can do with a token is sell it to a greater fool, you're participating in a Ponzi. It's all fun and games till the music stops, then lots of people are going to be left without chairs, and in these cases, life savings. This space has existed for over 6 years now, which ICO has generated revenue near it's "raise" ? Even 1M of revenue? Bitcoin is boring, but it's a real currency you can use. Move fast and break things is a bug not a feature. If you can't buy things with it, it's not a currency, it's Russian roulette.
- mmwako 9y agoGot a question on de business-model side of things: if Brave will block ads on websites, and replace them with their own advertisement and pay the user for looking at it, won't the owner of the website (aka the person that generated the valued content) get cut out of the deal? If so, assuming Brave succeeds, wouldn't it "kill the web", as there is no incentive to generate web-content anymore (a big % of websites gets financed through ads)? Am I missing something here?