6 ms·

I wonder why they chose to use (yet another) crypto currency for this.

by bvda 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
triclops200 7y ago
I'd assume to limit how much transaction costs for microtransactions from many users. Credit cards are awful for small transactions, so you buy a bulk of BAT every month to reduce transactional overhead and then let creators cash out when they have some threshould of BAT. They could have done it way simpler than a cryptocurrency, though, by just using a floating point number in a database somewhere, but I'm assuming they assume a distributed ledger is more secure somehow.
- PKop 7y ago
  >so you buy a bulk of BAT every month Why is nobody considering the exchange rate volatility here? Endless comments about saving a few pennies, while massive depreciation from holding large quantities in volatile crypto blow away any benefit of not using dollars.
  - dorgo 7y ago
    volatility is just a risk, a possibilty to loose money/value. Or even to gain. Transaction costs, on the other hand, are a certainty.
    - PKop 7y ago
      Measures of volatility greatly impact perceived value of whatever it is you are holding/investing in. Don't try to make the claim to me that high volatility will have no effect on both sides of this market demanding BAT. That's silly talk. If you want to try to tell me risk and volatility don't enter into decisions on which assets the market values, then you expose yourself as being as naive as I presume many buying into this idea are.
  - alwillis 7y ago
    As I mentioned further up in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532097), BAT is an ERC-20 token and can be easily converted to a stablecoin, which is pegged to $1 USD per token. So if you can avoid that if you want to.
    - PKop 7y ago
      I'm aware of so-called stable coins. The risk with them is you must trust they have the backing & will make good on your claim. Now, since Brave is a company dealing with customers and content creators who actually have to get paid by them, they already must be trusted...so I do think this would have a been a better way to go. I understand that crypto can be converted "easily". But how does that square with storing BAT in your wallet for long periods of time to frictionlessly use it to pay content-creators? Is "eaily converting" (presumably quickly with very small "hodl" periods) consistent with how the token is supposed to be used: stored on a wallet, collected by content creators periodically?
      - alwillis 7y ago
        The short answer: for many Brave and BAT users are just going to do the standard thing of using the BAT they earn to support content creators. These folks aren’t concerned with volatility. Users who are interested in building a business in the BAT ecosystem requires a different use case. Now, if the BAT ecosystem takes off and it becomes possible to build a business using BAT, there will be all kinds of services to help content creators deal with the gobs of BAT they may collect. Uphold, who is Brave’s partner that provides wallet services already has a bunch of useful services if someone has a non-trivial amount of BAT: https://uphold.com/ https://uphold.com/
Sargos 7y ago
You need some sort of cryptocurrency for this as microtransactions don't really work in the legacy system. Also by using their own token they can boot strap the ecosystem cheaply as they can mint the tokens themselves with the value accruing later after network participants are onboarded and transacting.
- brokensegue 7y ago
  microtransactions don't work on cryptocurrency...
  - hinkley 7y ago
    There are now three topics you can't discuss in polite company. Politics, Religion, and Blockchain. Just smile and change the subject.
    - brokensegue 7y ago
      > Politics, Religion, and Blockchain but you repeat yourself?
      - tuesdayrain 7y ago
        I'm constantly shocked by how any mention of blockchains is enough make masses of HNers look like absolute luddites. It's just another datastructure that happens to have an above-average level of hype surrounding it.
        brokensegue 7y ago
        Blockchain is not just a data structure. It has an associated political philosophy (ancap) and get rich quick schemes (ICOs/currencies). When NoSQL was big a decade ago nobody thought it would upend society or make everyone millionaires.
        7y ago
macspoofing 7y ago
Presumably, they want BAT to be publicly tradeable. Hard to do with a central currency.
- ac29 7y ago
  What central currency isnt publicly tradable? Thats the whole point. US currency even says "for all debts, public and private" on it.
nostrademons 7y ago
It's also critical that it be a currency not used for any purpose other than advertising. The point of BAT is to price attention: users have the option of opting out of ads, if they do so it means less BAT available for purchase, which raises the price of BAT, which increases the rewards for opting into ads, which means more people opt in, which leads to an equilibrium price. If they had used say Monero for this, they'd really be pricing drugs and then piggybacking on that with an ad system, which would destroy any market pricing mechanism that they get.
- visarga 7y ago
  > which raises the price of BAT Why would the price of BAT raise when uses opt out of ads?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Two mechanisms: 1.) Less inventory. Advertisers bid for spots on the platform, which means that if there're fewer users accepting advertisers, the remaining spots will require more BAT, which requires purchasing more BAT on the open market. Higher demand + constant supply = higher price. 2.) Fewer user rewards. Users receive BAT when browsing, which they can either tip to creators or sell on an exchange (I'm not sure the latter option is available right now). Unless the users or creators are themselves advertisers, there's no use for BAT though, other than selling it to an advertiser. So when fewer users are receiving BAT, there's less available for purchase on exchanges. Constant demand + reduced supply = higher price.
    - chc 7y ago
      > Less inventory. Advertisers bid for spots on the platform, which means that if there're fewer users accepting advertisers, the remaining spots will require more BAT, which requires purchasing more BAT on the open market. Doesn't this assume that advertisers would be willing to pay more for fewer eyeballs? That seems like a pretty big assumption.
      - 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
So that they can't control who gives money to whom? Unlike google/patreon who can take away your ad/tips revenue stream with flimsy excuses.
ulzeraj 7y ago
Anonymity. You can use the system without ever having to type your mail address or credit card.
- hk__2 7y ago
  Identity is much more than a name, a mail address or a credit card. Blockchain transparency means anyone can trace all your transactions.
gruez 7y ago
>(yet another) That part's simple: why wouldn't you want to create money from thin air?
thefreeman 7y ago
people will provide all kinds of reasons but let's be real... it's so they can get rich. they own an enormous amount of BAT just like any stakeholders in a newly created cryptocurrency.
fuu_dev 7y ago
Its about economics, with creating their own currency they have full control over the system and also get all the transaction/service/etc fees.
0x49d1 7y ago
Not another.. BAT is Ethereum ERC20 token: https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb6250d2887ef https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb62...

I wonder why they chose to use (yet another) crypto currency for this.

by bvda 7y ago

I wonder why they chose to use (yet another) crypto currency for this.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

triclops200 7y ago

I'd assume to limit how much transaction costs for microtransactions from many users. Credit cards are awful for small transactions, so you buy a bulk of BAT every month to reduce transactional overhead and then let creators cash out when they have some threshould of BAT. They could have done it way simpler than a cryptocurrency, though, by just using a floating point number in a database somewhere, but I'm assuming they assume a distributed ledger is more secure somehow.

PKop 7y ago
>so you buy a bulk of BAT every month Why is nobody considering the exchange rate volatility here? Endless comments about saving a few pennies, while massive depreciation from holding large quantities in volatile crypto blow away any benefit of not using dollars.
- dorgo 7y ago
  volatility is just a risk, a possibilty to loose money/value. Or even to gain. Transaction costs, on the other hand, are a certainty.
  - PKop 7y ago
    Measures of volatility greatly impact perceived value of whatever it is you are holding/investing in. Don't try to make the claim to me that high volatility will have no effect on both sides of this market demanding BAT. That's silly talk. If you want to try to tell me risk and volatility don't enter into decisions on which assets the market values, then you expose yourself as being as naive as I presume many buying into this idea are.
- alwillis 7y ago
  As I mentioned further up in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532097), BAT is an ERC-20 token and can be easily converted to a stablecoin, which is pegged to $1 USD per token. So if you can avoid that if you want to.
  - PKop 7y ago
    I'm aware of so-called stable coins. The risk with them is you must trust they have the backing & will make good on your claim. Now, since Brave is a company dealing with customers and content creators who actually have to get paid by them, they already must be trusted...so I do think this would have a been a better way to go. I understand that crypto can be converted "easily". But how does that square with storing BAT in your wallet for long periods of time to frictionlessly use it to pay content-creators? Is "eaily converting" (presumably quickly with very small "hodl" periods) consistent with how the token is supposed to be used: stored on a wallet, collected by content creators periodically?
    - alwillis 7y ago
      The short answer: for many Brave and BAT users are just going to do the standard thing of using the BAT they earn to support content creators. These folks aren’t concerned with volatility. Users who are interested in building a business in the BAT ecosystem requires a different use case. Now, if the BAT ecosystem takes off and it becomes possible to build a business using BAT, there will be all kinds of services to help content creators deal with the gobs of BAT they may collect. Uphold, who is Brave’s partner that provides wallet services already has a bunch of useful services if someone has a non-trivial amount of BAT: https://uphold.com/ https://uphold.com/

Sargos 7y ago

You need some sort of cryptocurrency for this as microtransactions don't really work in the legacy system. Also by using their own token they can boot strap the ecosystem cheaply as they can mint the tokens themselves with the value accruing later after network participants are onboarded and transacting.

brokensegue 7y ago
microtransactions don't work on cryptocurrency...
- hinkley 7y ago
  There are now three topics you can't discuss in polite company. Politics, Religion, and Blockchain. Just smile and change the subject.
  - brokensegue 7y ago
    > Politics, Religion, and Blockchain but you repeat yourself?
    - tuesdayrain 7y ago
      I'm constantly shocked by how any mention of blockchains is enough make masses of HNers look like absolute luddites. It's just another datastructure that happens to have an above-average level of hype surrounding it.
      - brokensegue 7y ago
        Blockchain is not just a data structure. It has an associated political philosophy (ancap) and get rich quick schemes (ICOs/currencies). When NoSQL was big a decade ago nobody thought it would upend society or make everyone millionaires.
        7y ago

macspoofing 7y ago

Presumably, they want BAT to be publicly tradeable. Hard to do with a central currency.

ac29 7y ago
What central currency isnt publicly tradable? Thats the whole point. US currency even says "for all debts, public and private" on it.

nostrademons 7y ago

It's also critical that it be a currency not used for any purpose other than advertising. The point of BAT is to price attention: users have the option of opting out of ads, if they do so it means less BAT available for purchase, which raises the price of BAT, which increases the rewards for opting into ads, which means more people opt in, which leads to an equilibrium price. If they had used say Monero for this, they'd really be pricing drugs and then piggybacking on that with an ad system, which would destroy any market pricing mechanism that they get.

visarga 7y ago
> which raises the price of BAT Why would the price of BAT raise when uses opt out of ads?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Two mechanisms: 1.) Less inventory. Advertisers bid for spots on the platform, which means that if there're fewer users accepting advertisers, the remaining spots will require more BAT, which requires purchasing more BAT on the open market. Higher demand + constant supply = higher price. 2.) Fewer user rewards. Users receive BAT when browsing, which they can either tip to creators or sell on an exchange (I'm not sure the latter option is available right now). Unless the users or creators are themselves advertisers, there's no use for BAT though, other than selling it to an advertiser. So when fewer users are receiving BAT, there's less available for purchase on exchanges. Constant demand + reduced supply = higher price.
  - chc 7y ago
    > Less inventory. Advertisers bid for spots on the platform, which means that if there're fewer users accepting advertisers, the remaining spots will require more BAT, which requires purchasing more BAT on the open market. Doesn't this assume that advertisers would be willing to pay more for fewer eyeballs? That seems like a pretty big assumption.
    - 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

So that they can't control who gives money to whom? Unlike google/patreon who can take away your ad/tips revenue stream with flimsy excuses.

ulzeraj 7y ago

Anonymity. You can use the system without ever having to type your mail address or credit card.

hk__2 7y ago
Identity is much more than a name, a mail address or a credit card. Blockchain transparency means anyone can trace all your transactions.

gruez 7y ago

>(yet another) That part's simple: why wouldn't you want to create money from thin air?

thefreeman 7y ago

people will provide all kinds of reasons but let's be real... it's so they can get rich. they own an enormous amount of BAT just like any stakeholders in a newly created cryptocurrency.

fuu_dev 7y ago

Its about economics, with creating their own currency they have full control over the system and also get all the transaction/service/etc fees.

0x49d1 7y ago

Not another.. BAT is Ethereum ERC20 token: https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb6250d2887ef https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb62...