You pretty much identified one of the main issues. We initially launched Brave Rewards (called 'Payments' at the time) with Bitcoin. Unlike HODLers, Brave users

You pretty much identified one of the main issues. We initially launched Brave Rewards (called 'Payments' at the time) with Bitcoin. Unlike HODLers, Brave users only wanted to purchase $5 or $10 at a time. In 2017, network fees and congestion got so bad that users would see 90% fees, and still not know when their BTC would arrive. We pivoted to the BAT, built on ERC-20. This relieved us from large fees and heavy network congestion, as well as enables us to do things like create a User Growth Pool (300M BAT) to drive growth. As an example, we recently sunsetted our referral program which generated more than $13M in rewards for publishers. Initially we had planned to stop the program after $1M had been distributed, but a healthy UGP enabled us to go much bigger. There is no animus towards BTC today. In fact, for our verified creators (https://creators.brave.com https://creators.brave.com), we'll even auto-convert your received BAT into BTC (or ETH).