7 ms·

I think Brave's potentially most important (and least certain) contribution to the world is its automatic micro-payments system. It's genuinely innovative and t

by _bxg1 7y ago

I think Brave's potentially most important (and least certain) contribution to the world is its automatic micro-payments system. It's genuinely innovative and the only viable alternative that anyone has proposed to ads-based funding for smaller sites. It's also, by nature, incredibly hard to bootstrap. But I really hope it gets real traction and ends up standardized and/or copied by other browsers.

sp332 7y ago
I mean to be fair, there were lots of other such micropayments systems. And some of them are even still running, with very low volume.
- prophesi 7y ago
  What examples do you have? So far I can think of Steem coin and Dogecoin. The former has the vendor lock-in issue, and the latter has no standardized automation of tipping.
  - sp332 7y ago
    Flattr was probably the most famous. It's still running, last I checked anyway. Readability.com tried something like that as well - remove ads from a site and pay the site owner directly instead. Site owners got very angry about this and it stopped that pretty quickly.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Flattr has recently added recurring subscriptions, though the browser extension obviously still works. (Not sure if the insert-in-website buttons still do ? They were pretty much killed off anyway after Twitter denied them API access 7 years ago...)
- alwillis 7y ago
  Sure, but Brave and BAT are as painless as it gets: • you get a grant of BAT to pay content creators on the web, YouTube, Twitter, etc. when you sign up • Brave can (optionally) automatically allocates BAT to the content creators you visit the most based on the amount of time you spend on their sites • you can opt-in if you wish to see ads related to things you're interested in and get paid in BAT • for BAT you earn, you have the option to pay content creators or cashout to fiat (dollars, euros, yen, etc.) Right now, Uphold is the gateway between earnings in BAT and fiat, but they're also working on integrating with Coinbase as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/cqjv7a/native_crypto_wallet_appears_in_brave_nightly/exdhe0g https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/cqjv7a/native_c...
  - fuu_dev 7y ago
    Would you mind explaining why any 3rd party coin is more painless then any popular native pay service that does not need additional steps?
    - LegitShady 7y ago
      What do you mean by native pay services?
      - fuu_dev 7y ago
        Services that work with real money and not over a virtual currency.
        LegitShady 7y ago
        The whole point is no money is invoked for the browser user unless they want to go to the frog me of withdrawing the bat they earned. Instead they can just assign it to someone they support That's what's superior. Real money services require someone to pay real money. This system could be done without the coin but I bet it would be more difficult to arrange transfer to each browser user.
manigandham 7y ago
No it's not the first or only attempt at this. Time (or other metric) based funding of content has been tried several times. We spent 6-figures on experimenting ourselves with a autopayments browser extension. The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  > it's paying the users first I didn't actually know about this mechanism. I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Adding another layer of ads on top is... interesting. But feels like it's just kicking the can down the road. What I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to current paywalls but broken down into effortless micro-distributions the way Brave is. So a subset of sites would say "you can only browse our site if you're using a browser that will pay us and you're paying $10/month (total) which will be distributed amongst us based on what sites you visit and how often". This would solve the main problem with paywalls, which is that literally nobody is willing to maintain dozens of separate subscriptions (both in terms of logistics and price) across all of the websites they read one article on each month. Apple News+ is trying a similar solution to this problem, but gated into their proprietary app. This could instead be a web standard that keeps people on the real web.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - alwillis 7y ago
    I believe the plan is to use BAT to pay for paywalled content and other premium features a site may have.
  - noxer 7y ago
    > I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Exactly, this is how it should be. Skipping ads/ad-revenue not glorify them by paying user to click it away. Please have a look at Coil.com it's exactly what they do.
noxer 7y ago
IMO it misses the point. I don't want ads. Pay me for seeing ads may be better than just see ads but what I really want is no ads. For now I block them. This way I get to see nearly no ads. I can't get my head around why I would let some ads trough to earn some bucks. It totally missing the point. What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange. There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)
- buboard 7y ago
  > we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive So, just buy more BAT and you dont need to see ads. other people may not be able to afford paying, so they 'll prefer to see ads > but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? The printing press, radio and TV always had ads, why? becuase it's the most natural fit, and it allows them to have more / better content. ad-supported content is not going away. A world with more options is always better
  - bluecalm 7y ago
    Does it show them to have better content though? Radio sucks these days as your get long as segments every 20 minutes. TV is just poison to your brain with constant ad bombarding. Press is dying and for good reason: it's basically low quality opinion pieces. Most journalists don't link to sources and can't stop themselves from inserting opinions presented as facts. I think Internet exposed even the most well established newspapers. You can get way better information by just looking for sources. I watch my movies on Netflix, sports on paid streaming services with little to no ads. The only quality ad supported content I am able to find is on YouTube mainly interviews, podcasts and educational videos. Even then I am supposedly able to pay to not watch the ads (YouTube red wasn't available in my country last time I've checked). Ads poison the content. People are willing to pay 50-100$ to watch a boxing night. I don't think it's impossible to make them pay for quality content.
buboard 7y ago
if this kind of model works, the biggest contribution will be security. potentially , cross-site scripting could be disabled altogether if it is no longer needed to fund the web
BlueTemplar 7y ago
What is not viable about Flattr ? (2.0, 1.0 admittedly required quite a bit of effort for website owners to set up...)
marknadal 7y ago
You might be interested in an alternative we propose called Freeism, it inverts the traditional economic model: https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd785441 https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7... The gist is that it redefines wealth from "how much people hoard" to "how much people give". Would enable an ad-free web.

by _bxg1 7y ago

sp332 7y ago

I mean to be fair, there were lots of other such micropayments systems. And some of them are even still running, with very low volume.

prophesi 7y ago
What examples do you have? So far I can think of Steem coin and Dogecoin. The former has the vendor lock-in issue, and the latter has no standardized automation of tipping.
- sp332 7y ago
  Flattr was probably the most famous. It's still running, last I checked anyway. Readability.com tried something like that as well - remove ads from a site and pay the site owner directly instead. Site owners got very angry about this and it stopped that pretty quickly.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Flattr has recently added recurring subscriptions, though the browser extension obviously still works. (Not sure if the insert-in-website buttons still do ? They were pretty much killed off anyway after Twitter denied them API access 7 years ago...)
alwillis 7y ago
Sure, but Brave and BAT are as painless as it gets: • you get a grant of BAT to pay content creators on the web, YouTube, Twitter, etc. when you sign up • Brave can (optionally) automatically allocates BAT to the content creators you visit the most based on the amount of time you spend on their sites • you can opt-in if you wish to see ads related to things you're interested in and get paid in BAT • for BAT you earn, you have the option to pay content creators or cashout to fiat (dollars, euros, yen, etc.) Right now, Uphold is the gateway between earnings in BAT and fiat, but they're also working on integrating with Coinbase as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/cqjv7a/native_crypto_wallet_appears_in_brave_nightly/exdhe0g https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/cqjv7a/native_c...
- fuu_dev 7y ago
  Would you mind explaining why any 3rd party coin is more painless then any popular native pay service that does not need additional steps?
  - LegitShady 7y ago
    What do you mean by native pay services?
    - fuu_dev 7y ago
      Services that work with real money and not over a virtual currency.
      - LegitShady 7y ago
        The whole point is no money is invoked for the browser user unless they want to go to the frog me of withdrawing the bat they earned. Instead they can just assign it to someone they support That's what's superior. Real money services require someone to pay real money. This system could be done without the coin but I bet it would be more difficult to arrange transfer to each browser user.

manigandham 7y ago

No it's not the first or only attempt at this. Time (or other metric) based funding of content has been tried several times. We spent 6-figures on experimenting ourselves with a autopayments browser extension. The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.

_bxg1 7y ago
> it's paying the users first I didn't actually know about this mechanism. I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Adding another layer of ads on top is... interesting. But feels like it's just kicking the can down the road. What I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to current paywalls but broken down into effortless micro-distributions the way Brave is. So a subset of sites would say "you can only browse our site if you're using a browser that will pay us and you're paying $10/month (total) which will be distributed amongst us based on what sites you visit and how often". This would solve the main problem with paywalls, which is that literally nobody is willing to maintain dozens of separate subscriptions (both in terms of logistics and price) across all of the websites they read one article on each month. Apple News+ is trying a similar solution to this problem, but gated into their proprietary app. This could instead be a web standard that keeps people on the real web.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- alwillis 7y ago
  I believe the plan is to use BAT to pay for paywalled content and other premium features a site may have.
- noxer 7y ago
  > I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Exactly, this is how it should be. Skipping ads/ad-revenue not glorify them by paying user to click it away. Please have a look at Coil.com it's exactly what they do.

noxer 7y ago

IMO it misses the point. I don't want ads. Pay me for seeing ads may be better than just see ads but what I really want is no ads. For now I block them. This way I get to see nearly no ads. I can't get my head around why I would let some ads trough to earn some bucks. It totally missing the point. What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange. There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)

buboard 7y ago
> we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive So, just buy more BAT and you dont need to see ads. other people may not be able to afford paying, so they 'll prefer to see ads > but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? The printing press, radio and TV always had ads, why? becuase it's the most natural fit, and it allows them to have more / better content. ad-supported content is not going away. A world with more options is always better
- bluecalm 7y ago
  Does it show them to have better content though? Radio sucks these days as your get long as segments every 20 minutes. TV is just poison to your brain with constant ad bombarding. Press is dying and for good reason: it's basically low quality opinion pieces. Most journalists don't link to sources and can't stop themselves from inserting opinions presented as facts. I think Internet exposed even the most well established newspapers. You can get way better information by just looking for sources. I watch my movies on Netflix, sports on paid streaming services with little to no ads. The only quality ad supported content I am able to find is on YouTube mainly interviews, podcasts and educational videos. Even then I am supposedly able to pay to not watch the ads (YouTube red wasn't available in my country last time I've checked). Ads poison the content. People are willing to pay 50-100$ to watch a boxing night. I don't think it's impossible to make them pay for quality content.

buboard 7y ago

if this kind of model works, the biggest contribution will be security. potentially , cross-site scripting could be disabled altogether if it is no longer needed to fund the web

BlueTemplar 7y ago

What is not viable about Flattr ? (2.0, 1.0 admittedly required quite a bit of effort for website owners to set up...)

marknadal 7y ago

You might be interested in an alternative we propose called Freeism, it inverts the traditional economic model: https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd785441 https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7... The gist is that it redefines wealth from "how much people hoard" to "how much people give". Would enable an ad-free web.