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I would personally much rather allocate actual dollars instead of CryptoBuckOfTheDay backed by ads I have no desire to ever watch. Say, $20/month that gets all

I would personally much rather allocate actual dollars instead of CryptoBuckOfTheDay backed by ads I have no desire to ever watch. Say, $20/month that gets allocated to sites I visit. The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong.

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago
But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support. The dollar has a scalability problem that BAT doesn't. Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
- lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
  The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also the service time. Most service won't let you take it out until your cash reach an high limit. With a concurrency, at worse you can keep using it in other alternative ways (at a bare minimum, on your web browsing in this case).
    - PKop 7y ago
      Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out. Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.
      - dwild 7y ago
        > Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out. Most exchange won't let you cash out over small amounts, but you can still exchange it. You aren't subject to fluctuation if it's already exchanged. It's so weird the amount of misinformation here... I know that people here may hate cryptocurrencies, but it's the same thing as having it stored somewhere in a DB. The only difference is that you can actually do something with it.
    - lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
      I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in.
      - jimmydorry 7y ago
        Try using USD or EUR at 5 or more decimal points.
        lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
        A creator would be far better served with coming up with a monetisation model that means they can make USD/EUR/whatever from Patreon (or their own PayPal/Stripe subscription etc.), than hoping for tiny nano-payments of cryptodosh from a niche interest web browser.
      - dwild 7y ago
        > I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in. Nothing stop you from exchanging it as soon as you can. If the website would be offering USD instead of BAT, you would still not be able to retrieve it until it reach a amount big enough to take out (Google Ads is at 100$, 25$ for international user on Patreon). Until it's actual USD in your bank account, it's not better than BAT and depends on the existence of the service. The difference is that BAT, you can still use it if you decide to, right now.
- PKop 7y ago
  Would you be upset if you did so in, say, June, then proceeded to lose double-digit percent of $ value placed in the wallet? How about if you're a content creator who got paid in these ever-volatile digital currency units...instead of dollars? If those same creators instantly traded out for $, what was their trading fees? Is all of this something to consider when singing the praises of saving a few pennies on transaction costs?
  - __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
    Brave hasn't rounded this corner yet, but I have to imagine that a future feature addition will be trading access to content for payments in BAT. When that happens, whether I care about the volatility will depend on the implementation. If content prices are in dollars, then yes, I suppose I have to accept some of the uncertainty that goes with the fluctuating exchange rate. If it's BAT that I trade for my content, then no--I already got _n_ tokens, they're redeemable for the same amount of content, their market value is meaningless to me. But whatever the case, I'll take it or leave it as a whole, depending on whether it's worth it to me. > saving a few pennies on transaction costs The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better. As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different? The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.
    - PKop 7y ago
- lalaland1125 7y ago
  > But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
  - alwillis 7y ago
    BAT is divisible to 18 decimal places, which means you can truly have micropayments that cannot (easily and cheaply) be done with dollars. How do you tip $.0035 for a tweet?
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      Does anyone care if they don’t get paid until they earn a full dollar? Saying I earned 0.00045 BAT is fun, but doesn’t actually help me with anything until I convert it to dollars anyway.
      - alwillis 7y ago
        The point is it’s not possible to send such small quantities with fiat currencies. If something becomes popular, those small contributions add up. BAT can also be used for paywalls, VPN payments, pay-per-view streaming and other smallish transactions. As the BAT ecosystem grows, there will be more incentive to transact in BAT, so there’s not so much of a need to convert to fiat. BTW, BAT is up nearly 8% as I write this, presumably on the news of the Brave 1.0 release. There’s a decent chance that BAT is worth significantly more 2 or 3 years now; we’re still in the early days. Finally, because BAT uses the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard, it automatically interoperates with the Ethereum ecosystem, including being able to be converted to other ERC-20 tokens, including stablecoins like PAX and GUSD, which are designed to always be valued at $1 per share, kinda like a money market fund.
    - lalaland1125 7y ago
      Brave's internal ledger for micro-payments can measure dollars to however many decimal places they wish. Sure, when you actually transfer money out of the system there will have to be some rounding, but those transfers are minimal as Brave can batch them. You only need one transfer for each user and one transfer for each content producer. You don't need and/or want the O(n^2) cross product transfers.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Getting BAT on an exchange is needlessly complex and painful (and actually impossible for a lot of people without handing the exchange all their personal details up to and including passport). I would much prefer to just give brave my CC details, regardless of what internal currency they’re using for rewarding content.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  Nowhere near as bad as the ecosystem around crypto, which is absolutely filled with scammers and criminals. Give me real money every day, I'm happy to pay a small fee in order to not have to deal with the hive of scum and villainy that is the cryptocurrency market.
hunterloftis 7y ago
I haven’t done it, but based on the configs I saw when setting up Brave, I believe that is an option as well.
ulzeraj 7y ago
Why does it seem wrong? Internet ads use your internet connection and time. Why should I watch them for free?
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Presumably you are viewing ads on a website that is giving you some sort of value so you aren't doing it for free.
  - mantap 7y ago
    In my experience the most valuable websites have few ads and the most trashy websites have the most.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      So why are you frequenting these 'trashy' sites? If you are, it must be because they offer some value, right? If you're not... then you don't see any ads from them. Someone else will, because they find value in the site.
      - gpm 7y ago
        Because the trashy sites are also the best at SEO (and google isn't properly incentivized to punish them for their ads) so you end up seeing them by accident.
      - mantap 7y ago
        Maybe trashy is the wrong word, but rather "low-effort" or "repetitive". A whole lot of news articles are just regurgitated Reuters or AP. There's nothing wrong with that and it is a valuable service. But I am completely indifferent to these sites existence. The sites that I would really care about if they went under, like HN, Wikipedia, NYT, etc, either use subscriptions or are donation funded. HN has job ads but they are super low key.
      - piokoch 7y ago
asjw 7y ago
It's so sad that Xanadu never took off. It was envisioned exactly like that
Nursie 7y ago
> The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong. And it's not new either. Tried many times in the past, and ends up not being enough for 'real' users to care, but people will try to exploit it.
nicpottier 7y ago
You can, though requires jumping through all the usual KYC hoops for buying a cryptocurrency, since that's what they use for micropayments. All managed through Uphold.
- dorgo 7y ago
  BAT is etherium based. If you happen to own some Ether it should be possible to buy BAt without (additional) KYC striptease.
  - buboard 7y ago
    BAT is in all major (and minor) exchanges so it should be easy to/from any cryptocurrency
prepend 7y ago
Me too, and I’m sure so would Brave. But it’s not really possible with dollars. Flattr tried it a while back where you could set aside 5 euro per month, or whatever, and they would distribute it to the stuff you liked the most. But the transaction fees were high for them and it was hard to do super small payouts. This is a crypto case that makes sense. I’m not quite sure how they will keep an exchange rate with the dollar as the only thing you can buy with it is cash to content. So you can buy BAT from Brave.
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  Why not? How do the ad buyers buy the ads which Brave are selling you? So yeah, all they have to do is to peg their currency to the dollar and it makes the whole discussion trivial. You get your content, content creators get paid, Brave get paid.
- npo9 7y ago
  The transaction fee hits two places. Once when money goes into the system and once when money goes out. If I spend $5/month and split it 50 ways there is no reason to pay a transaction fee on each 5cent transfer because it’s within the system. Twitch’s bits are a great example of this system.
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    I think the point was a low participation system relative to the web as a whole has meant systems where many bloggers accumulatad less than a withdraw transaction fee each. Aside from that, they need all the bother of registration. I'm not really sure how I feel about the idea that everyone should be accumulating money on all these things. It kind of devalues things to have people trying to make a lot from micropayments mixed with a more hobby web. I think I've eventually turned away from everything that had some get rich quick schemers show up.
DHPersonal 7y ago
I think it's possible to do that with the Brave Rewards program, as long as one verifies the rewards wallet with Upheld and then deposits money from a bank account to the wallet.
bduerst 7y ago
Google had something that did this, where it would show you pictures of cats instead of ads, but still allowed you to pay the website a couple pennies: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta Unfortunately, it only worked on Google ads, which is something like 40-55% coverage, so you would still see some ads from other networks. Not sure what they're doing with it now, but it was nicer than dealing with funbucks.
lonelappde 7y ago
It's impossible to transact in actual dollars online. Dollars are made of cloth. When you use a checking account or credit card online, it's using crypto. You can buy BAT and send it to a site owner.
kelkabany 7y ago
If you're interested in this model, we're looking for early beta users: https://www.intertimes.org https://www.intertimes.org

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago

But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support. The dollar has a scalability problem that BAT doesn't. Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?

lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
- dwild 7y ago
  > The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also the service time. Most service won't let you take it out until your cash reach an high limit. With a concurrency, at worse you can keep using it in other alternative ways (at a bare minimum, on your web browsing in this case).
  - PKop 7y ago
    Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out. Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.
    - dwild 7y ago
      > Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out. Most exchange won't let you cash out over small amounts, but you can still exchange it. You aren't subject to fluctuation if it's already exchanged. It's so weird the amount of misinformation here... I know that people here may hate cryptocurrencies, but it's the same thing as having it stored somewhere in a DB. The only difference is that you can actually do something with it.
  - lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
    I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in.
    - jimmydorry 7y ago
      Try using USD or EUR at 5 or more decimal points.
      - lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
        A creator would be far better served with coming up with a monetisation model that means they can make USD/EUR/whatever from Patreon (or their own PayPal/Stripe subscription etc.), than hoping for tiny nano-payments of cryptodosh from a niche interest web browser.
    - dwild 7y ago
      > I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in. Nothing stop you from exchanging it as soon as you can. If the website would be offering USD instead of BAT, you would still not be able to retrieve it until it reach a amount big enough to take out (Google Ads is at 100$, 25$ for international user on Patreon). Until it's actual USD in your bank account, it's not better than BAT and depends on the existence of the service. The difference is that BAT, you can still use it if you decide to, right now.
PKop 7y ago
Would you be upset if you did so in, say, June, then proceeded to lose double-digit percent of $ value placed in the wallet? How about if you're a content creator who got paid in these ever-volatile digital currency units...instead of dollars? If those same creators instantly traded out for $, what was their trading fees? Is all of this something to consider when singing the praises of saving a few pennies on transaction costs?
- __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
  Brave hasn't rounded this corner yet, but I have to imagine that a future feature addition will be trading access to content for payments in BAT. When that happens, whether I care about the volatility will depend on the implementation. If content prices are in dollars, then yes, I suppose I have to accept some of the uncertainty that goes with the fluctuating exchange rate. If it's BAT that I trade for my content, then no--I already got _n_ tokens, they're redeemable for the same amount of content, their market value is meaningless to me. But whatever the case, I'll take it or leave it as a whole, depending on whether it's worth it to me. > saving a few pennies on transaction costs The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better. As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different? The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.
  - PKop 7y ago
lalaland1125 7y ago
> But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
- alwillis 7y ago
  BAT is divisible to 18 decimal places, which means you can truly have micropayments that cannot (easily and cheaply) be done with dollars. How do you tip $.0035 for a tweet?
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Does anyone care if they don’t get paid until they earn a full dollar? Saying I earned 0.00045 BAT is fun, but doesn’t actually help me with anything until I convert it to dollars anyway.
    - alwillis 7y ago
      The point is it’s not possible to send such small quantities with fiat currencies. If something becomes popular, those small contributions add up. BAT can also be used for paywalls, VPN payments, pay-per-view streaming and other smallish transactions. As the BAT ecosystem grows, there will be more incentive to transact in BAT, so there’s not so much of a need to convert to fiat. BTW, BAT is up nearly 8% as I write this, presumably on the news of the Brave 1.0 release. There’s a decent chance that BAT is worth significantly more 2 or 3 years now; we’re still in the early days. Finally, because BAT uses the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard, it automatically interoperates with the Ethereum ecosystem, including being able to be converted to other ERC-20 tokens, including stablecoins like PAX and GUSD, which are designed to always be valued at $1 per share, kinda like a money market fund.
  - lalaland1125 7y ago
    Brave's internal ledger for micro-payments can measure dollars to however many decimal places they wish. Sure, when you actually transfer money out of the system there will have to be some rounding, but those transfers are minimal as Brave can batch them. You only need one transfer for each user and one transfer for each content producer. You don't need and/or want the O(n^2) cross product transfers.
Aeolun 7y ago
Getting BAT on an exchange is needlessly complex and painful (and actually impossible for a lot of people without handing the exchange all their personal details up to and including passport). I would much prefer to just give brave my CC details, regardless of what internal currency they’re using for rewarding content.
DagAgren 7y ago
Nowhere near as bad as the ecosystem around crypto, which is absolutely filled with scammers and criminals. Give me real money every day, I'm happy to pay a small fee in order to not have to deal with the hive of scum and villainy that is the cryptocurrency market.

hunterloftis 7y ago

I haven’t done it, but based on the configs I saw when setting up Brave, I believe that is an option as well.

ulzeraj 7y ago

Why does it seem wrong? Internet ads use your internet connection and time. Why should I watch them for free?

hombre_fatal 7y ago
Presumably you are viewing ads on a website that is giving you some sort of value so you aren't doing it for free.
- mantap 7y ago
  In my experience the most valuable websites have few ads and the most trashy websites have the most.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    So why are you frequenting these 'trashy' sites? If you are, it must be because they offer some value, right? If you're not... then you don't see any ads from them. Someone else will, because they find value in the site.
    - gpm 7y ago
      Because the trashy sites are also the best at SEO (and google isn't properly incentivized to punish them for their ads) so you end up seeing them by accident.
    - mantap 7y ago
      Maybe trashy is the wrong word, but rather "low-effort" or "repetitive". A whole lot of news articles are just regurgitated Reuters or AP. There's nothing wrong with that and it is a valuable service. But I am completely indifferent to these sites existence. The sites that I would really care about if they went under, like HN, Wikipedia, NYT, etc, either use subscriptions or are donation funded. HN has job ads but they are super low key.
    - piokoch 7y ago

asjw 7y ago

It's so sad that Xanadu never took off. It was envisioned exactly like that

Nursie 7y ago

> The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong. And it's not new either. Tried many times in the past, and ends up not being enough for 'real' users to care, but people will try to exploit it.

nicpottier 7y ago

You can, though requires jumping through all the usual KYC hoops for buying a cryptocurrency, since that's what they use for micropayments. All managed through Uphold.

dorgo 7y ago
BAT is etherium based. If you happen to own some Ether it should be possible to buy BAt without (additional) KYC striptease.
- buboard 7y ago
  BAT is in all major (and minor) exchanges so it should be easy to/from any cryptocurrency

prepend 7y ago

Me too, and I’m sure so would Brave. But it’s not really possible with dollars. Flattr tried it a while back where you could set aside 5 euro per month, or whatever, and they would distribute it to the stuff you liked the most. But the transaction fees were high for them and it was hard to do super small payouts. This is a crypto case that makes sense. I’m not quite sure how they will keep an exchange rate with the dollar as the only thing you can buy with it is cash to content. So you can buy BAT from Brave.

radicalbyte 7y ago
Why not? How do the ad buyers buy the ads which Brave are selling you? So yeah, all they have to do is to peg their currency to the dollar and it makes the whole discussion trivial. You get your content, content creators get paid, Brave get paid.
npo9 7y ago
The transaction fee hits two places. Once when money goes into the system and once when money goes out. If I spend $5/month and split it 50 ways there is no reason to pay a transaction fee on each 5cent transfer because it’s within the system. Twitch’s bits are a great example of this system.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  I think the point was a low participation system relative to the web as a whole has meant systems where many bloggers accumulatad less than a withdraw transaction fee each. Aside from that, they need all the bother of registration. I'm not really sure how I feel about the idea that everyone should be accumulating money on all these things. It kind of devalues things to have people trying to make a lot from micropayments mixed with a more hobby web. I think I've eventually turned away from everything that had some get rich quick schemers show up.

DHPersonal 7y ago

I think it's possible to do that with the Brave Rewards program, as long as one verifies the rewards wallet with Upheld and then deposits money from a bank account to the wallet.

bduerst 7y ago

Google had something that did this, where it would show you pictures of cats instead of ads, but still allowed you to pay the website a couple pennies: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta Unfortunately, it only worked on Google ads, which is something like 40-55% coverage, so you would still see some ads from other networks. Not sure what they're doing with it now, but it was nicer than dealing with funbucks.

lonelappde 7y ago

It's impossible to transact in actual dollars online. Dollars are made of cloth. When you use a checking account or credit card online, it's using crypto. You can buy BAT and send it to a site owner.

kelkabany 7y ago

If you're interested in this model, we're looking for early beta users: https://www.intertimes.org https://www.intertimes.org