The current ad-tech ecosystem is a complete disaster, and Eich's vision for replacing it is, I think, genius.
Leverage properties of cryptography to build a browsing experience which respects privacy but retains opt-in ad relevance and anonymous metrics, and further leverage developments in cryptoeconomics to balance the requirements of user <-> publisher <-> advertiser in a properly-designed content generation and consumption ecosystem.
I find the whole idea elegant, ambitious and pragmatic.
What specifically do you find anti-user about Brave?
> The current ad-tech ecosystem is a complete disaster, and Eich's vision for replacing it is, I think, genius.
Eich's SALE of positioning his company as a gateway to all online advertising while spinning this as "pro-privacy" is indeed genius.
His actual vision of the product and the positioning of Brave as a controlling arbiter over all ads (and thus, as a central collection and monitoring point for data around ad consumption) is quite dystopian.
Nothing about logging our ad views to a publicly inspectable blockchain is in the interests of privacy. All it does is offer Eich's company an opportunity to make yet another skeezy ad platform with a new series of buzzwords. It will not be more difficult to game than any other browser, but it will sound impressive and current and gain ad buys.
And I submit that the inevitability of the ad network is itself a questionable notion when a more direct service economy is not only historically how things were done. That model faded as broadcast technology outpaced other IT, but as other IT caught up we've been seeing a return to direct-to-customer service models and these are outperforming ad models in some media markets.
It is not inherently a "blockchain" idea to sell off your time as ads in order to pay for your browser, and other folks are at least pretending to align their business model with user interests while building an information and attention economy (e.g., Steem)
Please read the white paper at attentiontoken.org. We do not dream of monopolizing the browser market, of course.
Apollo phase of the roadmap will have multiple clients supporting BAT, with as much endpoint (client and site/creator/user, hard KYC issues here due to centralized fiat currencies and governments) logic moved on chain as we can given future Ethereum scaling and anonymity support. Web standards for particular innovations as apps join the platform and gain enough scale.
This technical interview with Eich was extremely illuminating and I'd urge you to watch it, particularly the second half: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUtHhYes6-A
The current ad-tech ecosystem is a complete disaster, and Eich's vision for replacing it is, I think, genius.
Leverage properties of cryptography to build a browsing experience which respects privacy but retains opt-in ad relevance and anonymous metrics, and further leverage developments in cryptoeconomics to balance the requirements of user <-> publisher <-> advertiser in a properly-designed content generation and consumption ecosystem.
I find the whole idea elegant, ambitious and pragmatic.
What specifically do you find anti-user about Brave?