
The Brave browser is brilliant, but probably not for the reasons you think - Rudism
https://rudism.com/the-brave-browser-is-brilliant/
======
surround
The reason why “the internet is broken” is because of ads. Ads incentivize
tracking and clickbait. In the end, ad companies, such as Google and
Faceboook, act in the interests of advertisers, not users. Brave is an ad
company.

On the other hand, companies which are supported by user donations act in the
best interests of users. This includes websites such as Wikipedia and the
Internet Archive.

Brave _does_ offer the option to make a “tip” to websites, but it’s hardly
necessary to have Brave be the middleman for all user donations.

~~~
6510
I think _FREE_ is the problem. Anything that is free will either find ways to
make you pay for it or has other people pay for it. As a bonus you don't have
any complaints either since you officially didn't pay.

Is Wikimedia acting in users best interest? It really doesn't need to beg for
your money but it cant get enough of your money? haha

I don't know what it costs to host 250 billion page views per year but they
claim 40% is spend on hosting. They have 180 million to spend so hosting would
be72 million? 1 dollar would buy 1400 page views? If you simply use a crappy
service, say hostinger's 1 usd per month x 12 you get 1200 GB bandwidth.
Average wiki articles are 3.6 kb. That is 27 million page views. 20 000 times
1400? I'm not an expert but I imagine hosting on that scale is much cheaper.

It is acting in my interest 1:20000 which is certainly better than selling my
personal information to creepy faceless money men.

I would much rather buy access to 250 GB worth of wiki articles for 1 euro but
no one figured out the payment model.

Brave does seem lovely until you see them solicit funds in other peoples name
without permission. It much seems like [say] collecting funds for Greenpeace
but hey! I keep an administrative chunk for myself.

The puzzle is unsolved.

Good luck

~~~
onyva
Free is NOT the problem. Free is the “business model” of the internet. Just
because some people want to monetize it doesn’t mean we need to give up and
just let them do what they want. Selling ads is not the purpose of the
internet. Content created to sell ads is most of the time garbage. No chicken,
no egg no puzzle to resolve.

~~~
jfengel
Most content is garbage, but there exists content you want. If it didn't
exist, you wouldn't be looking for it, and you wouldn't see any ads.

Ads are just the most friction-free way (from the reader's point of view) to
pay for it. You don't have to install anything or connect your bank account.
There's a lot wrong with that, including the proliferation of crappy content,
but it does fund a lot of the genuine content as well. Both readers and
writers want a better way, but results are mixed at best.

~~~
onyva
I think if you have something worth saying, having an audience I a reward.
True that there are different types of content, say “tutorials” that are
valuable and wouldn't have been produced otherwise, but the monetization
platform are themselves an incentive to produce stuff that really no one ever
would’ve wanted to read or watch. Look at the profits of YouTube. Yes 1% is
very valuable but most of it pure rubbish, that’s not only is dumbing
societies down and inciting violence, it’s also a horrible waste of resources,
human an natural.

I don’t know what’s the answer. Maybe a separate “commercial” internet, sort
of shopping internet, where you you accepting the rules and the reward is your
attention, time and resources for free content.

------
jsjddbbwj
Am I the only one who uses brave with all bat stuff off? It's a fork of
chromium that's up to date, completely open source, ad blocking and
fingerprinting defeating built-in, reader mode, etc. Chrome but just better.

~~~
zrobotics
I don't use it on desktop, but it's the best android browser I have used. For
whatever reason, Firefox is a battery hog on my current phone, so I switched
to brave. Although I agree with this article, the crypto model they have is
scammy at best.

I should really switch browsers on my phone; while brave works OK the fact
that their revenue model is broken should signal that they will likely need to
do something shady in the future. I never opted in to BAT simply because I
figured that maybe 1% of the sites I visit would be opted in to the program.
Plus, I'm not going back to watching ads.

~~~
fastball
I'm not sure you understand how the Brave/BAT/Ads dynamic operates.

Brave with the BAT features turned on still uses its builtin adblock.

From there, I think you need to state a bit more clearly how is their revenue
model broken.

------
hiccuphippo
What kind of information from the user does Brave hold and/or give to their ad
publishers? And for how long? You are going from a situation where many ad
networks receive pieces of information (ok, google 90% of the time) to a
single ad network receiving 100% of information, which I don't think is good.
Not to mention Brave becomes the gatekeeper of which content publishers
receive BAT and I remember there was controversy over them banning someone's
account because they didn't like the content.

I'll stick with uBlock, thanks.

~~~
BrendanEich
I hope you mean uBlock Origin!

------
sleavey
I will not use Brave because I disagree with the legitimacy it gives to ads on
the web. I want an ad-free web, or at least an ads-in-anything-like-their-
current-form web. If that means the web is 1000x smaller than it currently is,
then fine - most of the web today is total garbage anyway. I don't care about
jobs supported by ads, because they're another form of 21st century bullshit
job and we can invent some other forms of bullshit job to replace those lost
to an ad-free web.

~~~
fastball
Do you believe ads should not exist in the world period?

How do you justify such a broad-spanning assertion?

~~~
sleavey
I did not say they should not necessarily exist, I said they should not exist
in their current form. I also want to go back to the days where websites were
a labour of love from individuals, not always for-profit enterprises. Ads
right now are attention stealing, privacy invading monsters as a result of an
arms race for users' notice. They actively harm users for profit. There are
ways to advertise without harming users, and hence there is a way to make
business work on the web. I will continue to block every ad I see and refuse
to use websites that find ways to circumvent ad blockers until providers
significantly change their behaviours.

~~~
fastball
How do Brave's ads actively harm users?

~~~
anoncake
That's kinda the point of ads.

~~~
fastball
The purpose of ads is to _harm_ users?

------
azalemeth
I never really looked into BAT and only use Brave on mobile (mostly then as
its UI for its javascript switch is far better than dealing with uMatrix on
firefox mobile).

I had no idea that the whole thing is yet another altcoin IPO with excellent
marketing. They really must be laughing all the way to the bank...

~~~
animalnewbie
Fx mobile has umatrix?!?! /Runs to download

~~~
solnyshok
fx preview has uBlock

~~~
boudin
The nightly build only for now

~~~
skrebbel
Huh? Fwiw I've run firefox mobile on Android with ublock origin for at least a
year now.

~~~
ccmcarey
I believe they're referring to the preview browser, not the current one. The
preview is only starting to support extensions again.

~~~
boudin
Yes, I should have precised. Web extensions are a work in progress in Firefox
preview. Currently it is only supported in Firefox preview nightly and only
ublock origin is available.

------
DyslexicAtheist
being in the camp of "nothing ever good comes from adds", I've never
considered Brave.

A browser is a remote code execution engine for attacker-controlled content.
Looking at their bounties on H1
[https://hackerone.com/brave/hacktivity](https://hackerone.com/brave/hacktivity)
they are still solving problems which Mozilla and Google have researched and
extinguished long ago. I don't trust Brave to get the security right. Also
Ethereum is a scam and doesn't scale but that's a whole other topic.

As for their claims around paying content generators with their fake monopoly
money, this article was absolutely on point.

~~~
chrisco255
Brave is Chromium-based...it's literally a fork of the core source code for
Chrome, so I don't think it would be any more insecure than that. And with
Microsoft forking Chromium for Edge, Chromium should continue to get top-notch
support on that front.

Ethereum is not a scam. It has evolved a great deal over the past 6 years, and
thanks to zero-knowledge proofs, ETH does scale now (up to 2300 transactions a
second, without any need for further upgrades...see Loopring for an in-
production implementation of this tech
[https://loopring.org/#/](https://loopring.org/#/)), so you should update your
knowledge on the subject.

It's not fake money. It's getting paid to view ads. This is not even a new
idea. I used to use an internet service back in the 90s that was free as long
as they could spam me with ads (NetZero). Facebook and Google make hundreds of
billions of dollars off of ads, do you really think there's no room in that to
give back to consumers of ads some portion of the revenue? The only reason
they don't is because their duopoly over internet advertising is pretty stable
right now.

~~~
mjd
> It's not fake money. It's getting paid to view ads.

It's getting paid with fake money to view ads.

~~~
staticvoidmaine
Given that it’s convertible into USD and other “real” currencies, how do you
expect this line of reasoning to hold?

~~~
crimsonalucard
Did you read the article?

Inventing a currency out of thin air so they can mint as many dollars as they
want and you and other geniuses can form a secondary market where all of you
can trade it is the genius of brave and the point of this article.

Instead of paying you, they make their own currency and pay you. You can make
some money off of it in the secondary market because some other idiot thinks
it's worth actual money.

~~~
Proziam
So, cutting through your negativity, it's _worth money_? Whether or not you
like it is one thing, but it inarguably has a monetary value.

~~~
crimsonalucard
Yeah it is worth money. Similar to how heroin is worth money.

You know what else inarguably has monetary value? A perfect one to one copy of
an american 100 dollar bill. This absolutely has monetary value and therefore
you should buy it, just like how you should buy crypto.

~~~
ikt
> Yeah it is worth money. Similar to how heroin is worth money.

I'm not sure how you integrate a distributed heroin based system into a
browser.

~~~
crimsonalucard
No buddy this is called an analogy. Meaning some things are similar but other
things are not. Through average human intuition and intelligence you can
derive that I'm not comparing the physical nature of heroin to the abstract
nature of crypto.

What I am comparing is the illegitimacy of heroin to the illegitimacy of the
crypto issued by Brave. I am sorry that you were incapable of deducing this.
But now with this simple explanation of the nature of an analogy you get it!

------
latchkey
I've been clicking the desktop ad notifications like a madman. Earning BAT,
then taking that BAT and converting it to an interest bearing stable coin
token in DeFi (~8%). Some of the BAT I earn, I also convert into ETH so I can
pay for gas, making my transactions 'free'. It has been a fun experiment in
playing with this stuff, but it certainly isn't going to make me rich or
anything.

~~~
katsura
You don't have to click on them to earn tokens.

~~~
latchkey
Oh really? That's interesting... any documentation on this?

~~~
katsura
Yes, here: [https://support.brave.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360026361072-Bra...](https://support.brave.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360026361072-Brave-Ads-FAQ)

> In the initial Brave Ads release, users receive BAT for viewing the ad
> notifications. In future releases, users will be able to earn additional
> rewards for engagement events within the ad tabs. Brave does not reward
> users for clicking on the notifications. Brave’s position is that users
> should only click on ads that they have a genuine interest in engaging with.

~~~
latchkey
Sweet! You just saved me some clicking. Thanks!

------
Angeo34
The way Brave is doing it currently though makes it look worse than snake oil.
Why would they advertise a fingerprinting if it actually makes your
fingerprint more unique? Why would they advertise Tor although using it inside
Brave makes you instantly unique???

If this wasn't the case I'd not have a problem with it. This way it just seems
like a huge scam (which considering you can just use Firefox with some add-ons
it probably is Mr. Brendan Eich)

~~~
songshuu
I think you wholly misunderstand that the fingerprint is randomized on every
restart of the browser.

That is so much noise that it renders fingerprinting as a strategy utterly
useless.

~~~
Angeo34
You are aware being based on Chromium means you cannot fake many vectors? Even
Tor browser isn't able to spoof e everything Chromium hardly can spoof 1% of
what Tor/Firefox can.

You will maybe have a randomized fingerprint but it doesn't matter if 99% of
other fingerprinting vectors are Stoll left open.

Just look at their github. They have fingerprinting bugs that are beyond
uniquely identifying (fonts best example) which are open since years. It isn't
solvable through Chromium which all of Brave knows yet they market this.

~~~
BrendanEich
Chromium is just C++ and it can be hacked. The claim that something "isn't
solvable through Chromium" shows magical thinking.

If a vector can be randomized or otherwise arms-raced vs. the remote adversary
via C++, then "Chromium" is not an obstacle for Brave. Consider the case of
extensions, where your point would have been valid if you'd written "Chromium
extensions".

Fingerprinting can be done many ways, but most are not economic: they cost too
much for the too few bits they get from the target browser. The common
methods, notably fingerprint2.js, use APIs that we at Brave, along with Apple
and others in the W3C Privacy CG, are taking on.

ICYMI, [https://brave.com/whats-brave-done-for-my-privacy-lately-
epi...](https://brave.com/whats-brave-done-for-my-privacy-lately-episode3/).

~~~
Angeo34
Again. If it's so easy to modify Chromium code to hide for example fonts and
window decoration and css leakers why didn't you do it yet? The bugs are open
since at least 3 years.

I mean benefit of doubt is one thing but you claim it can be done while it's
hard to read it out with JS (which it isn't it's a ten line script to identify
all of those vectors). But the cpp code that requires thousands of lines of
edits is easy?

------
onyva
“...its built-in advertising network and Ethereum-based crypto token exchange
system.”

I really don’t think that that’s a selling point. I really think most would
think this is not a browser’s job.

Also, not our job to help Eich displace Google. As users, this is not our
concern at all.

~~~
fastball
Integrating those things into the browser is for:

1\. user privacy – the data for ads is processed _in_ your browser and then
only meta is sent to the ad network. Rather than the current system, where
Google's/Facebook's ad network fingerprints your browser and then tries to
track everything you do on the web.

2\. convenience – you can have the browser automatically donate money to the
people/websites you visit most without any payment processor middleman.

~~~
onyva
1.) I’m not gonna trust a company like Brave with anything personal. Why would
I?

2.) We’ve got Mozilla doing a great job.

Monetizing the internet is not a priority I care about and ads are not what I
need my browser to optimize.

Also there will always be the problem of Bernden Eich who gave money to take
away people’s most basic right in California. I can’t support that.

~~~
fastball
1) Because it's open source so you don't need to trust them.

2) How is Mozilla facilitating that at all, much less doing a great job of it?

3) Brendan Eich co-founded Mozilla, so that's pretty funny given your point
(2).

~~~
onyva
1) being open source doesn’t mean much in this context.

2) Mozilla’s stated goal and track record is user privacy. Brave’s is a Trojan
horse for an alternative ad network.

3) we know who Eich is. Having co-founded Mozilla doesn’t make him a saint.
The fact that his world view (expressed through real substantial action that
has impact on people’s lives and happiness) is not compatible with what
Mozilla stands for, is the reason why he’s not there anymore.

~~~
fastball
(2) is not related to ad networks at all. Mozilla does not facilitate this
point in any way.

~~~
BrendanEich
Ignoring Onyva's misstatements, please note that Mozilla does depend for most
of its revenue on Google's ad system (people don't use "ad networks" much any
longer, but as a loose term for a platform such as Google's Authorized Buyers
and AdSense programs, it'll do).

Brave does not have such a data-breaching ad "network" or "real-time bid"
platform. Instead the Brave browser downloads a fixed-per-day-for-large-N-
population ads/offers catalog of URLs with metadata for each URL, including
the first level text-y search-like ad call to action, only if that browser's
user opts in. This catalog compresses well and delta-updates, similar in scale
to anti-malware/anti-phishing lists. For ad confirmations we use a blind
signature protocol (Privacy Pass variant).

~~~
onyva
Mozilla doesn’t embed an ad network in your browser!?!? Why would anybody want
a browser that does this?

You can do whatever you want to do with Firefox. Enjoy the free blocking
mechanisms, including fingerprinting, and install whichever 3rd party ad
blocker.

Users understand the relationship there, so please don’t try to spin it. It’s
not about user’s data.

You’re embedding an ad client into the browser. You want to sell ads yourself.
Selling ads and controlling the browser is Google. That’s a conflict of
interests.

* fixed typos

~~~
BrendanEich
Brave doesn’t “embed an ad network in your browser” either. If we should
bother taking more, let’s agree on common definitions first.

We give no browsing data out to any server including ours, and we pay users
70% of the gross. This user-first design flips the Google model that Mozilla
facilitates by default for its ad revenue share. If our users don’t like it,
we go out of business. If Firefox users remain unaware of their uncompensated
value to Google, Mozilla thrives. Got it?

~~~
BrendanEich
*talking more

------
NelsonMinar
I'm grateful to the author for the detailed analysis of the cryptocurrency
part of the grift. Before I'd never got past the "Brave is taking ad revenue
from publishers and keeping it for themseleves" part in any detail.

~~~
ac29
All ad networks keep revenue for themselves, so in this regard they aren't any
different than Google or Facebook providing the ads. But, they also give a cut
to users, so unless Brave's cut + the user cut is less than the existing ad
networks' take, that's less money for publishers.

~~~
NelsonMinar
What a facile turn you took there. Google and Facebook have agreements with
the websites they place the ads on. They asked for those ads to be there.
Brave did not.

~~~
ac29
I think I misunderstood your comment - you are right, Brave's status quo is
that they keep all of the revenue from by replacing publishers ads (minus they
amount they give to users). My point was that in theory, if:

1) advertisers were willing to pay Brave the same amount as they do existing
advertisers, and

2) Brave took a similar cut as existing advertisers (including user payouts),
and

3) Publishers were actually taking BAT from Brave

Then there wouldn't be much of a financial difference in who was placing ads.
#3 is obviously not the case currently, which seems to be the point you were
making.

To be 100% clear: I don't support what Brave is doing, have never used their
products, and think their entire business model and its associated crypto-
nonsense is _at best_ a waste of time.

~~~
NelsonMinar
Fair enough. I think the concept of some alternate way of paying publishers is
great. But that's not what Brave is doing. They're more like the AdBlocker
Plus shakedown, where they deprive a site of their ad revenue and then say
"well if you want some of that back you can have part of it back from us by
showing the ads we want you to."

------
divbzero
> The idea that a single user browsing the web could have earned Brave
> anywhere near $25 in ad revenue is (coming from someone who worked in the ad
> industry for a couple years) completely absurd.

Wait, is that what my attention is worth to the online ad industry? I would
gladly pay <$25/month to not be tracked for ads. (Or, even better, enjoy that
as a consumer right protected by law.)

~~~
graeme
I think they're talking about an average user. Someone willing to pay not to
get ads is probably worth more than $25.

~~~
divbzero
Fair point.

I currently pay $0 for a decent ad blocker but my DNS is still unencrypted. I
would not be surprised if my former ISP (Big Cable Co) found a way to track me
that way, hopefully my current ISP (local utility) would not. Also suspect
that data can leak through the ad blocker anyway via first-party requests.

------
_bparks_
The BAT stuff is dumb....I can’t wait to watch 30 mins of ads for 3 cents of a
fake money no one wants.

~~~
zormino
It's literally taking other people's content, putting their own ads on it, and
paying you fake money for the privalege. If I create content, I should be
allowed to charge for it. I'm okay with people not wanting to pay or being
worried about their security and disabling those ads. I am 1000% not okay with
them stealing content to run their own ads. I don't want their fake money,
they are essentially running a scam. They may as well just rehost other
people's articles and videos with their own ads and skip the whole browser
thing entirely, same scam different name.

I don't care that a tonne bat shit has real monetary value. I don't want it.
It's not legal tender, I'm not willing to accept it. I don't care that their
fake internet tokens have monetary value. I don't want them. Brave is stealing
from people and paying them in shit.

------
untangle
The article should be entitled "Brave Executive Team is Brilliant."

Brilliant in two ways: (1) they are an ad company that has fairly successfully
wrapped itself in a Klingon Cloaking Sheild made up of "open source" and "pro-
privacy" atoms; and (2) they did an ICO at a perfect time (peak of hype with
BC soaring) and ease of implementation (Etherium). It was so good (bad) that
it brought a tear to my eye.

Getting back to the article, I felt that the grade school "Daddy-O" interludes
were unnecessary and distracting but I otherwise really liked it. And the
illustrations were boss!

In fact, I liked it so much that I wanted to buy the author a coffee. So I
clicked the link and...I was taken to some startup payment service that made
it a chore to pay $3, so I bailed. I thought that was ironic as that payment
site reminded me of Brave. Intermediating a common transaction with useless
clutter and therefore foiling it.

So the Brave exec team and founders made a nice chunk of change and have
perpetrated a ruse. But, luckily for users, they balanced Karma by producing a
mighty-fine browser. Its capabilities rank it among the best.

------
jl2718
It’s been almost 30 years and I still don’t understand why browsers exist.
Isolated client-server apps were always better. Except that app design now
emulates the browser. Soon we’ll have wasm apps that look and feel like
windows 1.0 and call it revolutionary.

~~~
surround
I actually prefer web apps because browsers make it easy to view control
what’s being sent over my network. Requests are decrypted in the browser and
can be viewed in plaintext with the browser console. They can be blocked using
tools such as uBlock Origin.

Standalone client-server apps have full, unsandboxed control of your computer.
It’s impossible to see the content of encrypted network requests, short of
hacking into the app. See: Wacom’s drivers track the name of every application
that you open:

[https://robertheaton.com/2020/02/05/wacom-drawing-tablets-
tr...](https://robertheaton.com/2020/02/05/wacom-drawing-tablets-track-name-
of-every-application-you-open/)

~~~
jl2718
This is a good point, and I agree with you, but it seems there are better
methods of isolation. Cell phones do this pretty well, and they are the
dominant platform anyway, so I guess we're moving in that direction. I just
wish I could use the UI features of a PC for all they offer beyond screen-
based gestures.

~~~
surround
I suppose it’s less about isolation than about control. Phone apps are even
more difficult to sniff.

------
threepio
Similar points to this critique, previously on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776990)

------
almost_usual
I’ve been using Brave for years and this blog post ironically convinced me to
try BAT.

------
zelly
Misleading title. I thought it was going to eschew the cryptocurrency stuff
and focus on the fact that it's a just Chromium with some built-in privacy
features, which is the only reason I use it.

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "You’re going to be browsing the web anyway; you’re going to be
inundated with ads anyway;"

Naaaah, Firefox with uBlock Origins and Privacy Badger makes sure I don't see
ads, but thank you for trying.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
Can a similar level of privacy be reached through extensions with Safari on
iOS or Chrome on Mac?

~~~
mrtksn
Yes. I use safari on both, never see any ads and often get disappointed that I
can’t be outraged when a post pops up about how we can see how FB/Google
tracks us.

On mac I use adGuard, in iOS I use Refine content blocker.

------
decentralised
I'm a big fan of Brave! Not only do I have a mostly ad-free web experience but
it also saves me bandwidth and time. 22 hours saved in one year to be precise.

------
syllable_studio
Hey there @rudism, I'm glad you found out about Brave, thanks for sharing
about it! You should consider verifying yourself as a brave publisher so we
can tip you on this platform that you're "not going to use any time soon" :)

My brave browser tells me: " rudism.com: Not yet verified This creator has not
yet signed up to receive contributions from Brave users. Any tips you send
will remain in your wallet until they verify. "

------
cdrake
[https://brave.com/transparency/](https://brave.com/transparency/) To have a
better idea of creators and advertisers volume.

But hey Rudis is probably right. Everything should be free and no one should
get paid for work. lets not even try to fix or attempt a different economic
model. We're all so happy with the current one...

------
jeffrallen
...When it isn't crashing.

------
gitgud
Maybe if instead of BAT, they could use a credit card payment or PayPal....
They've proven to scale very well too....

~~~
rtisdale
A major idea behind the software is that you can automatically tip websites or
creators that you frequently consume.

These amounts are pretty small.

If PayPal or credit card were used (without prefunding things) you'd have most
of that money eaten up by transaction costs.

As others have mentioned, this does seem to be a "real" use for crypto
currency to achieve microtransactions.

------
npv789
at least i got something for what i do everyday (browsing)

------
mattlondon
Totally off-topic but I really liked the CSS/design for this site. Simple
layout, nice choice of fonts, and a sensible and easy-to-read colour
combination for this "wall of text" style presentation. Nice one.

~~~
jackewiehose
Interesting... I find it absolutely terrible. White monospace font on a black
background - no thanks. Without reader mode I wouldn't stay a second on such a
page.

~~~
rectang
You're not alone. The book "Type and Layout" by Colin Wheildon describes a
"readability" experiment measuring the impact of various typographical
techniques on whether subjects comprehend a magazine article. Light text on
black background performed abysmally.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1875750223](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1875750223)

(Naturally I believe people who say white-on-black works for them, but I don't
believe that preference is universal or should be a default if readability is
an important criteria.)

~~~
e12e
Print and screen are not the same - as print is reflective, while screens are
typically a light source. E-ink is closer to (low resolution, poor quality
paper) print.

~~~
Marsymars
> E-ink is closer to (low resolution, poor quality paper) print.

Was curious so I checked - high-end ereaders are 300 PPI, which tends to be
the minimum PPI for good quality print.

~~~
e12e
Granted, dpi and ppi aren't the same - but print would normally be more like
1200 dpi. Even low en laser printers are 600 dpi. So while you might print a
300 ppi image, you'd probably print it at much higher than 300 dpi. E-ink
screens are in a kind of middleground - they certainly have lower contrast and
resolution than movable type (depending a bit on paper quality, but compared
to say printed books).

------
wdjdkjwjeje
Brave is brilliant at mobile design is what they're brilliant at. I find
Chrome and Firefox on Android unusable because of how much better browsing
with Brave feels. Firefox Lite and Microsoft Edge get closer to the pleasure
of using Brave on mobile but neither comes close to matching it since Firefox
lacks the reliability of Chromium browsers (I know, boo choosing browsers
based on usefulness) and Edge has a fetish for bloated sub-menus.

~~~
huffmsa
> _Edge has a fetish for bloated sub-menus_

A Microsoft product with drop-downs inside of drop-downs? Say it ain't so.

Brave does feel good, but it would be better if the spyglass at the bottom was
"find in page" and not Search, since we have an omnibar.

------
_rrnv
The author discovered how capitalism works. Everything that has value, has it
because there are people willing to pay for it, not necessarily because it has
value or purpose. To use a tangible example instead of a virtual one - go read
how diamonds have been pumped up by the mining-cutting cartels to be perceived
as very valuable while in fact it's very hard to convert them to cash without
a significant loss. PS. I've read recently that to move large money in times
of crisis it's best to use diamonds, rubies etc. over gold or cryptocurrencies
(cash is a non-starter, too much space). Well good luck with converting these
stones back at purchase value. It boggles the mind that people can't see how
much freedom 24 seed words give in times of crisis. You could move a billion
dollars stashed in pages of a harlequin novel through every border & customs
check and nobody would ever know. Try that with physical materials.

~~~
pjc50
> how much freedom 24 seed words give in times of crisis. You could move a
> billion dollars stashed in pages of a harlequin novel through every border &
> customs check and nobody would ever know. Try that with physical materials.

But there's a problem: you never moved the money at all. You need to bookend
it with two transactions to move the real money in and out of the bitcoin
system, which nearly always involves intersecting the controls of the real
system. It's more like hawala banking. And can suffer 50% exchange rate swings
in a very short time.

------
stronghands
If you can have the same ad free experience without a token doesn’t that make
the token redundant and in long term Occam principle dictates it won’t catch
on.

~~~
wffurr
Until content publishers go out of business or lock their content behind
paywalls, and the "ad free experience" only has hobbyist blogs and amateurs.

A lot of low rent internet chum would also disappear. So maybe that's a fair
trade off, but it will also hurt your local newspaper pretty badly.

Nobody has really come up with a good sustainable alternative to ad-funded
content for a lot of publishers. Brave is one of many attempts at this, too
bad it smells a lot like a crypto currency scam.

~~~
wutbrodo
> A lot of low rent internet chum would also disappear. So maybe that's a fair
> trade off, but it will also hurt your local newspaper pretty badly.

Wow, we have _completely_ different understandings of the value of the
Internet. To me, the (realized) promise of the Internet is not just an
additional channel for established media, it's the decentralization of
publishing in the first place. "Low rent internet chum" is a consequence of
that, but IMO it's been far more than worth the tradeoff.

~~~
wffurr
Ad networks have been a key enabler of decentralized publishing. Anyone can
sign up to an ad network and start getting paid for clicks. No traditional
gatekeepers there. So I'm not sure where you get this idea that what I'm
saying is in any way contradictory to what you said.

~~~
wutbrodo
The implication of the above comment is "low rent chum will die (good) but
establishment channels like newspapers will also die (bad)". I'm saying that
the decentralized "low rent" stuff is the value of the Internet imo, not
providing another medium for channels that already exist.

------
cryptica
One of the problems with BAT is that ERC20 doesn't scale so as they get more
users, they will need to cut back on the frequency of payments. Also, a lot of
that value is absorbed by the Ethereum network as transaction fees (GAS).

~~~
terhechte
Isn't that a temporary problem though? With ETH 2 launching probably by the
end of the year?

~~~
latchkey
ETH2 phase 0 _may_ come at the end of the year. It will be many more years
before ETH2 is live and trusted with real funds... enough to either absorb
ETH1 or switch over to it. Heck, it may not happen at all. Amazing how this
group mindset around ETH2 works.

~~~
cryptica
Agreed. I think most people don't realize how massive of a technical challenge
it is to shard something as large and complex as the Ethereum blokchain
without introducing critical security vulnerabilities.

When you combine the complexity of the system, the constant need to try to
maintain backwards compatibility and the sheer number of people involved in
the project, you have every reason to be skeptical.

~~~
latchkey
I've also been following the progpow debate rather closely for the last 1.5
years. ProgPoW is supposed to be a simple PoW change to keep ETH1 asic
resistant now that asics have been developed.

This is a 2 year old codebase that has had a paid audit and tons of eyes on
it. Just this week, someone discovered and announced an issue. While the fix
is relatively trivial, the amazing thing is that it went unnoticed for so
long.

I can only imagine ETH2, which is a brand new codebase, whole new consensus
model, using cutting edge research (zkSNARKS) and shaped like a rube goldberg
machine, will be full of issues nobody has even dared to imagine. I couldn't
imagine trusting billions of dollars of value to that literally over night.

------
Dahoon
Brave is just like Adblock whitelists, just hidden behind tech most people
won't understand. The end result is the same. A scam.

------
cslarson
Brave is indeed very fast and particularly on mobile it is useful that the ad
blocker is built-in. Thigh I think for most normies the fact that no plug-in
is needed is underrated. I haven't opted in to ads. They pop up as
notifications on mobile and it is very annoying.

