I would personally much rather allocate actual dollars instead of CryptoBuckOfTheDay backed by ads I have no desire to ever watch. Say, $20/month that gets allocated to sites I visit. The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong.
But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support. The dollar has a scalability problem that BAT doesn't.
Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
> But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support
This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
Brave's internal ledger for micro-payments can measure dollars to however many decimal places they wish. Sure, when you actually transfer money out of the system there will have to be some rounding, but those transfers are minimal as Brave can batch them.
You only need one transfer for each user and one transfer for each content producer. You don't need and/or want the O(n^2) cross product transfers.
The point is it’s not possible to send such small quantities with fiat currencies. If something becomes popular, those small contributions add up.
BAT can also be used for paywalls, VPN payments, pay-per-view streaming and other smallish transactions. As the BAT ecosystem grows, there will be more incentive to transact in BAT, so there’s not so much of a need to convert to fiat.
BTW, BAT is up nearly 8% as I write this, presumably on the news of the Brave 1.0 release. There’s a decent chance that BAT is worth significantly more 2 or 3 years now; we’re still in the early days.
Finally, because BAT uses the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard, it automatically interoperates with the Ethereum ecosystem, including being able to be converted to other ERC-20 tokens, including stablecoins like PAX and GUSD, which are designed to always be valued at $1 per share, kinda like a money market fund.
They don't currently integrate with a payment provider, and if they did they'd have to deal with that provider shutting off payments due to pressure from governments looking to censor content. They'd also have to generate income tax documents in a wide variety of jurisdictions.
Doing the kind of business worldwide where you pay people in fiat (rather than just get paid) is a tremendous undertaking. Even Google hasn't managed to pull it off worldwide just yet:
Would you be upset if you did so in, say, June, then proceeded to lose double-digit percent of $ value placed in the wallet?
How about if you're a content creator who got paid in these ever-volatile digital currency units...instead of dollars? If those same creators instantly traded out for $, what was their trading fees? Is all of this something to consider when singing the praises of saving a few pennies on transaction costs?
Brave hasn't rounded this corner yet, but I have to imagine that a future feature addition will be trading access to content for payments in BAT. When that happens, whether I care about the volatility will depend on the implementation. If content prices are in dollars, then yes, I suppose I have to accept some of the uncertainty that goes with the fluctuating exchange rate. If it's BAT that I trade for my content, then no--I already got _n_ tokens, they're redeemable for the same amount of content, their market value is meaningless to me. But whatever the case, I'll take it or leave it as a whole, depending on whether it's worth it to me.
> saving a few pennies on transaction costs
The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.
As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?
The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.
Once you can have a single BAT wallet that is used by all your devices (another feature that I assume is in the works), it will make a bit more sense to buy BAT with dollars (instead of with ad views).
If you're making that purchase, you might as well time it with a down-swing in the price (or away from an up-swing). Some users will spend more cycles on timing their buys than others, and those users will have a stabilizing effect on the price.
Also, the price of BAT in USD over the last 60 days has stayed between 0.12 and 0.24... it's not exactly as crazy as you're making it out to be.
Getting BAT on an exchange is needlessly complex and painful (and actually impossible for a lot of people without handing the exchange all their personal details up to and including passport).
I would much prefer to just give brave my CC details, regardless of what internal currency they’re using for rewarding content.
The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market.
Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
> The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market.
The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also the service time. Most service won't let you take it out until your cash reach an high limit. With a concurrency, at worse you can keep using it in other alternative ways (at a bare minimum, on your web browsing in this case).
I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in.
I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years.
Sure, but even with an inflation rate of 2%, if you hold USD for 10 years, its purchasing power is cut in half.
Every BAT token that’s ever going to exist has already been minted, so it can’t be inflated by creating more of it. There will be no quantitive easing, “too big to fail” or bailouts in the BAT ecosystem.
That almost certainly will not be the case for either the dollar or the Euro.
As currently constructed, BAT is designed to be used quickly. Nobody should hodl BAT at this point unless we see it gain value and become fully fleshed out.
Given that there’s no doubt there will be at least one financial crash with the dollar and other fiat currencies, there’s a more than decent chance BAT will outperform the dollar in the next 10 years, which frankly, wouldn't be too difficult.
> I'm reasonably sure USD (or EUR) will still exist, have some reasonably similar value, and be usable in five years. There are quite a lot of crypto tokens I do not have anywhere near that level of confidence in.
Nothing stop you from exchanging it as soon as you can.
If the website would be offering USD instead of BAT, you would still not be able to retrieve it until it reach a amount big enough to take out (Google Ads is at 100$, 25$ for international user on Patreon). Until it's actual USD in your bank account, it's not better than BAT and depends on the existence of the service. The difference is that BAT, you can still use it if you decide to, right now.
A creator would be far better served with coming up with a monetisation model that means they can make USD/EUR/whatever from Patreon (or their own PayPal/Stripe subscription etc.), than hoping for tiny nano-payments of cryptodosh from a niche interest web browser.
Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out.
Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.
> Ok, but the difference with waiting to accumulate dollars vs waiting to accumulate crypto currency is that with crypto you are subject to massive currency fluctuations while you wait to cash out.
Most exchange won't let you cash out over small amounts, but you can still exchange it. You aren't subject to fluctuation if it's already exchanged.
It's so weird the amount of misinformation here... I know that people here may hate cryptocurrencies, but it's the same thing as having it stored somewhere in a DB. The only difference is that you can actually do something with it.
Nowhere near as bad as the ecosystem around crypto, which is absolutely filled with scammers and criminals.
Give me real money every day, I'm happy to pay a small fee in order to not have to deal with the hive of scum and villainy that is the cryptocurrency market.
Google had something that did this, where it would show you pictures of cats instead of ads, but still allowed you to pay the website a couple pennies:
Unfortunately, it only worked on Google ads, which is something like 40-55% coverage, so you would still see some ads from other networks. Not sure what they're doing with it now, but it was nicer than dealing with funbucks.
Me too, and I’m sure so would Brave. But it’s not really possible with dollars.
Flattr tried it a while back where you could set aside 5 euro per month, or whatever, and they would distribute it to the stuff you liked the most. But the transaction fees were high for them and it was hard to do super small payouts.
This is a crypto case that makes sense. I’m not quite sure how they will keep an exchange rate with the dollar as the only thing you can buy with it is cash to content. So you can buy BAT from Brave.
The transaction fee hits two places. Once when money goes into the system and once when money goes out. If I spend $5/month and split it 50 ways there is no reason to pay a transaction fee on each 5cent transfer because it’s within the system.
I think the point was a low participation system relative to the web as a whole has meant systems where many bloggers accumulatad less than a withdraw transaction fee each. Aside from that, they need all the bother of registration.
I'm not really sure how I feel about the idea that everyone should be accumulating money on all these things. It kind of devalues things to have people trying to make a lot from micropayments mixed with a more hobby web. I think I've eventually turned away from everything that had some get rich quick schemers show up.
Why not? How do the ad buyers buy the ads which Brave are selling you?
So yeah, all they have to do is to peg their currency to the dollar and it makes the whole discussion trivial. You get your content, content creators get paid, Brave get paid.
You can, though requires jumping through all the usual KYC hoops for buying a cryptocurrency, since that's what they use for micropayments. All managed through Uphold.
So why are you frequenting these 'trashy' sites? If you are, it must be because they offer some value, right? If you're not... then you don't see any ads from them. Someone else will, because they find value in the site.
Not really, sometimes you search for some information (camera review, headphones review, medical information, toys, whatever) and instead of landing on some site that has good information you end up on some crap site with crap content and tons of ads.
Why? Because owner of that site had resources to do SEO (if one has money, one can trick Google algorithms without much trouble). How they earned that money? Through ads, obviously.
The more ads such site has, the more revenue comes in and more money can be spend on SEO to increase revenue. And so one.
Who pays for that? Those who landed on such site, they wasted time, read some potentially infomercial content.
This ads -> money -> SEO -> more ads -> money is not particularly beneficial for the economy. This looks like one more incarnation of Gresham-Copernicus law - bad content is pushing away good content. If you spend money on content, you don't spend them on SEO, so you earn less money from ads and finally you end up on 5th Google results page and that's the end.
Because the trashy sites are also the best at SEO (and google isn't properly incentivized to punish them for their ads) so you end up seeing them by accident.
Maybe trashy is the wrong word, but rather "low-effort" or "repetitive".
A whole lot of news articles are just regurgitated Reuters or AP. There's nothing wrong with that and it is a valuable service. But I am completely indifferent to these sites existence.
The sites that I would really care about if they went under, like HN, Wikipedia, NYT, etc, either use subscriptions or are donation funded. HN has job ads but they are super low key.
But that's exactly what the ancestor comment was suggesting
>I would personally much rather allocate actual dollars instead of CryptoBuckOfTheDay backed by ads I have no desire to ever watch. Say, $20/month that gets allocated to sites I visit. The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong.
If you want to provide TV content, go for it. But if your content has ads, don't be surprised when people skip all the ads, because ads are offensive, and they're free to skip them. So that's an awkward business model to rely on. The consumers aren't the ones being unethical; you chose to put yourself in an aggressive and dubious position in the first place. I prefer public and collectively-funded broadcasting.
Ah I see what you're getting at now. Sure, ads are unethical and they shouldn't publish them, but since they will anyway, and it would be too heavyhanded to prevent them (by making it illegal, say), we should look at ways to defend ourselves against them.
They're not paying me for the compute resources their suspicious unnecessary JavaScript payload consumes. If they were good actors respecting my property, I would respect theirs.
I think it's possible to do that with the Brave Rewards program, as long as one verifies the rewards wallet with Upheld and then deposits money from a bank account to the wallet.
It's impossible to transact in actual dollars online. Dollars are made of cloth. When you use a checking account or credit card online, it's using crypto.
