
Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments - allenscott
https://news.bitcoin.com/brave-browser-bitcoin-micropayments/
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hackuser
To the critics: The problem is, how to pay for content while maintaining user
control over their privacy? Micropayments seem like a solution, and Brave has
found an economical way to implement them. How would you change Brave and,

* Still solve the confidentiality problem

* Be realistically economical: Everyone gets paid

* Earn a profit (not a sin and a good way to make the project sustainable)

* Have a technical and practical means of widespread adoption (e.g., personal contact with one website at a time isn't practical).

Social change, such as user confidentiality on the Internet, comes when
someone finds a practical way to get it done, not when we all complain about
it. Naysayers on the sidelines who simply don't like change and find fault for
sport are, as reformers have long pointed out, the biggest obstacles.

Kudos to Brave for tackling this tough and very important issue. They just
might change the world.

~~~
st3v3r
"* Earn a profit (not a sin and a good way to make the project sustainable)"

It is a sin if you're doing it by replacing a publisher's advertising with
your own.

~~~
guroot
I believe the default setting in brave is to block ads not replace. The user
has control over what the browser does.

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mootothemax
If I'm an advertiser, why would I want to advertise _only_ to people who _can
't afford $5/month_ to turn off ads internet-wide?

That's the problem advertising faces; as soon as you encourage people with
disposable income to avoid all advertising, the whole system becomes
pointless.

~~~
Sir_Substance
Says a lot about the sociatal value of the system, really.

~~~
SilasX
But it's better (at least in some respects) than the alternative, which is
that people don't have the option to see the content even if they are willing
to pay. That happens because they can't get enough people to follow through on
that valuation of the content (e.g. due leakage through client circumvention)
in order to produce it.

It's a massive coordination problem that Brave (and IIRC the Google
Contributor project) are attempting to solve.

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mike-cardwell
I have a website. How do I let the Brave Browser know what my bitcoin address
is, so that people who visit my site can send me money? Presumably I can just
shove it in a HTTP response header or HTML meta tag? Anyone know where the
docs for this are?

~~~
mike-cardwell
Oh. They take a 5% cut. Next question, how do I prevent this system from
working on any of my websites?

~~~
mst
How else would you suggest they maintain the infrastructure without turning
the users back into the product?

~~~
tokenizerrr
What infrastructure is there to maintain? Conceptually all that needs to
happen is:

* Website sends HTTP response header containing a bitcoin address

* Browser keeps a bitcoin wallet

* Browser shows a button to send bitcoin from said wallet to said bitcoin address

And that's it.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Yes, that is ideally how it would work. Yes, they have infrastructure which
needs paying for, but that infrastructure only exists in the first place so
that they can take a cut of the donations.

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BrandiATMuhkuh
Full disclosure I'm Founder of [https://pagescrub.com](https://pagescrub.com)
a "pay for no ads" project

Based on my research Brave will probably have a hard time through UX issues
and companies/webpages boycotting it.

I talked to readability founder who tried to take money on behalf of webpages
when blocking ads. Readers were very happy about the service and loved to pay.
But the issue was the companies didn't "take" their money. Mainly because they
didn't like that readability did all of that without asking them before. One
can say they were simply pissed. From my view Braves users also have to change
to much. A new browser + a new payment system.

Best would be if the reader pays on one page and the rest is done for them. No
new browser, No Plugin, No Special payment system. Of course this page has to
negotiate with each Website first. With
[https://pagescrub.com](https://pagescrub.com) I tried exactly that.

------
ramblenode
I want to like the idea of Brave but have a hard time seeing this project
taking off. It requires buy-in both from publishers, who make more money from
ads, and from visitors, who probably don't want to spend money, configure a
payment option, or switch from their current browser. Good idea for a cross-
browser plugin, but an entire browser?

~~~
nicpottier
Ya, agreed. I'd much rather have this built into my ad blocker extension. IE,
I could configure a wallet there which I could fund and they could send micro-
payments based on the ads I block.

(sorta like Google's contributor but more open / distributed)

~~~
stri8ted
Yup. I see no reason why this could not be implemented as a WebExtension
(which will be compatible with Chrome/FF/Edge). Perhaps performance would
suffer a bit relative to native. Having a synced history between Chrome
devices, is enough reason for me to not switch browsers, let alone stored form
inputs.

Having a general purpose wallet built into the browser would be quite
interesting. Think 1 cent Bitcoin paywalls.

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MichaelBurge
It's a neat idea, but I feel like users need to be rewarded for it to really
take off. Look at Patreon as an example: If you support someone there, they
will often deliver rewards every month and payment is tied to the reward.

This straightforward implementation ignores some of the privacy ideas, but
might be a starting point: If a site notices I'm using a Brave-compliant
browser, it tells me that I can unlock some new articles, music, artwork,
search features, or whatever by funding my Brave wallet and clicking the
'support' button. Once supported, they deliver the missing content.

Even a simple 'Thank you for supporting us with Brave' would probably
encourage use.

~~~
Eridrus
Publishers hate Brave though: they destroy much of the value those impressions
have and then take a cut.

Or at least they hate the idea of Brave, I doubt they take it seriously enough
to really hate it. Brave will probably be resigned to the software scrap heap
after this funding round runs out.

~~~
abhv
As the interface shows, users get a report of how many times (and for how
long) they viewed their top X websites. They then have an new _option_ to
contribute Y$ to those sites proportionally and _effortlessly_.

This is a totally new option for people who dont want to see ads.

Publishers who hate this plan show similar behavior to tobacco companies in
the 1980s. They have a profitable, entrenched market and don't want to yield
one bit of it.

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pavel_lishin
It's interesting that the balance is displayed in USD, instead of Bitcoins.
Does this mean that Brave is holding on to my USD, and buying up Bitcoins at
time of payment? Seems like both I and content creators could get shafted with
exchange rates.

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etchalon
Who exactly would use this product?

You'd have to be someone who doesn't mind ads, but doesn't like bad ones,
while also being someone who is willing to pay for content so you do not see
ads.

More to the point, in what possible universe is there a moral justification
for stripping a publisher of the advertising they've selected, only to replace
it with your own, and then dictating to the publisher what percentage of that
revenue they deserve?

If you care about users, just strip out ads. Don't replace them.

If you care about publisher's getting paid, just establish a mechanism that
makes it easy for people to stick a META tag in their header which shows a
Bitcoin address for payment remittance.

Publisher's can then implement a mechanism to verify whether individual users
have paid.

If your project needs to make a profit, either charge for the browser or the
service which intelligently strips out ads, the way Tivo charges for their
"Guide" feature.

This is a convoluted business model which helps literally no one other than
Brave.

~~~
hackuser
> Who exactly would use this product?

People who value their privacy and don't like to be tracked

~~~
etchalon
Those people would just use an AdBlocker, in their existing browser and on
their mobile device.

~~~
hackuser
Sorry, I should have said: People who want content creators to be paid fairly,
but who don't want to be tracked.

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anonymousDan
Can someone elaborate on where the Brave wallet is stored? Is it stored on the
clients device or on Brave's servers somewhere?

~~~
espadrine
I feel like articles about the Brave model tend to misleadingly represent the
situation.

Brave has servers that replace websites' ads on-the-fly. They receive money
from advertizers for doing that. As a result, the wallet is on Brave's
servers.

But publishers don't get paid. The money is stuck on Brave's servers until
publishers come to an agreement with Brave, which the huge majority of
websites have not. In fact, some publishers have expressed their intent to sue
Brave (see [http://www.wired.com/2016/04/brave-software-publishers-
respo...](http://www.wired.com/2016/04/brave-software-publishers-respond/)).
Since Brave behaves like they have made a unilateral contract with publishers
that publishers have not signed, there is a fair chance that the publishers
could win in court.

~~~
throwawayReply
Could this push advertisers toward delivery over https?

I am assuming that brave won't replace https content on the fly of course.

~~~
espadrine
In theory, they actually can replace https content on the fly.

They are the browser. They have control.

They can convert the visible URL to a call to their proxy server, which
performs an HTTPS call on your behalf. They receive the request, replace ads,
and send it back to you in TLS, along with the certificate information that
they received from the real server, which they'd show the user.

But I expect they won't do that, so one can hope.

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k__
They wrote about URL based microdonations.

For example for content creators like youtubers so that youtube doesnt get a
cut from the donation.

How does Brave decide who has a legitimate claim on that money?!

~~~
stri8ted
Presumably the user who generates the URL can claim the funds.

------
tiles
One case in which Brave does not want to replace website ads is for sites that
run their own ad networks, or ones which have a contract with an ad network
expressing that they will not resell user data.

A large part of their motivation hinges on ad networks routinely reselling
user data without express consent. The business opportunity assumes users will
pay (in this case by viewing ads to benefit Brave, the website owner, and
themselves) for the privilege of not having their browsing habits tracked. If
the net result of this experiment is that websites move toward non-tracking ad
networks with legal protections against reselling user data, users no longer
have incentive to use Brave, but it's a net win for user and website owner.

------
Scirra_Tom
Donation buttons on websites are no where near as prolific as they used to be
15 years ago (Paypal donate buttons). I can't help but feel this is just
because people don't want to donate - they'd rather keep their money. This is
not a friction problem.

This feels like Changetip v2 which is in my opinion not a viable business
model. Their target market is people who want to donate widely and not
specifically. This is a user group I don't think exists, the ones who want to
donate are a subset of the websites most dedicated users.

In my opinion this is an unsustainable business model.

------
habosa
So it's like Google contributor, but it runs through Brave.

Brave is a story of how to take a good product and make it bad. It started out
as "Link Bubble" which was one of the most innovative apps on Android. Brave
bought it, introduced a number of bugs, and added "Brave Shields". These
'shields' generally break most sites around the web by blocking trackers and,
more importantly, replacing website ads with ads that pay Brave.

Note: I work for Google but have nothing to do with Google contributor.

~~~
ramblenode
> replacing website ads with ads that pay Brave

Do you have a source for this? I had not heard of this until now.

~~~
habosa
[https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html](https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html)

The graph shows the following payout distribution:

    
    
      * 55% publishers
    
      * 15% ad partners
    
      * 15% brave
    
      * 15% brave users
    

Whatever you think of internet ads, I don't think Brave is a publisher's best
friend.

------
csbubbles
Brave Software incorporated more than 1 year ago. They raised $7M (?) over its
existence. But no one practically knows about them. And who cares about ads
and Bitcoin? I personally just ignore them everywhere, have kind of immunity
already. The other people use AdBlock. Why would anyone want to pay for
removing ads on web, use another browser for that, or pay for that with
Bitcoin (who cares?)? I guess, I am missing the whole point of what those guys
do and why...

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nolim1t
It's a good start, but I think there needs to be a meta tag (as mentioned) to
specify a payment address rather than have Brave hold the money.

I hope this comes soon

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cwiggs
Isn't this kind of like Flattr ([https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)) ?

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IncRnd
With a choice of paying someone to remove ads or removing those ads with any
one of a number of free methods, I'll choose option #2.

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SimeVidas
Is there a way to add bitcoins to Brave, without having to scan my ID on
Coinbase?

~~~
guroot
Yes, it generates an address to send them to.

~~~
SimeVidas
Ok, but where do I get bitcoin?

~~~
aianus
You can usually buy small amounts of Bitcoin directly on www.coinbase.com via
ACH without ID. Depends on the fraud score the ML fraud system assigns to you.

Circle and LocalBitcoins are also options (although I've never used Circle).

Disclaimer: I work for Coinbase

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WayneBro
Why add features that users don't really care about before features that users
do really care about?

There are a minimum set of extended functions that I need from a browser that
I'm going to use daily. They are: a speed dial that I can manually organize, a
quick javascript switcher and an adblocker. Brave has only one of those.

So I'll stick with Chrome/Chromium on my desktops thank you very much. On
mobile, Dolphin Browser gives me 2 out of the 3. So, for a long while I did
most of my mobile browsing on an 8 inch Windows tablet with full Chrome.
Recently I have been trying out an iPad Pro 9.7 to replace that tablet. It's a
better device in every way except for the web browsing which is a second rate
experience on iOS.

However, I'm thinking of forking Brave for iOS so that I can make it do
whatever I want. It's just a wrapper for WkWebView written in Swift. Shouldn't
be too hard to alter for my purposes - I might get started this weekend!

~~~
hackuser
This could be said of any innovation. Users want faster horses.

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aminorex
Wake me up when they support financial privacy. Monero or nothing.

