Comment by imiric
1 year ago
I think that cryptocurrencies get an undeserved level of hate, and that it would be perfect for monetizing a project like a web browser. Yes, there are scam coins, but there are also legitimate use cases for it.
IMO the Basic Attention Token used by Brave is a good way to do it. Users have the option to earn BAT by watching "privacy-friendly" ads, or exchange fiat into BAT and skip seeing ads. They can then use the funds to support websites they visit, or the browser developer. I'm not a Brave user, but this always seemed to me like the best way to transition away from the intrusive and hostile ad-based business models, and into one that eliminates the middle-man and allows users to support content creators directly.
> perfect for monetizing a project like a web browser
They could also try regular old fashioned money for monetization. It has worked for ~3,000 years pretty well and you can buy things like food and shelter with it in pretty much every country on earth.
Also rich patrons supporting artists was how many of the greatest artworks of many civilisations were commissioned for thousands of years...
Is writing software closer to growing potatoes or designing the Sagrada de Familia, or writing the Clarinet Concerto?
I'd argue that writing a web browser is a lot closer in scope to writing a symphony than building a house - at least in audience and durability. In a house's life time, maybe 100 people live in it, and perhaps 2000 people visit it, but a browser, or a symphony, will have an audience of millions.
The market is massively smaller. The impact massively larger.
I guess also for context, a lot of the code I write is closer to the "house" or even "potatoes".
A one-off script to extract data for a report - potato.
A brochure website for a company that'll be replaced in 6 years, a small house (or even just an interior of a house, or kitchen revamp...).
Assuming you mean the electronic form of fiat, it's not a good fit for microtransactions because of the fee requirements. A digital currency can be used for much smaller and frequent transactions. Not Bitcoin and most major ones, but there are currencies optimized for real-time transactions with minimal fees, so it is possible.
It's a shame that the cryptocurrency stigma doesn't allow legitimate uses of the technology to enable novel business models and user experiences. But keep downvoting me because you disagree. :)
I disagree, as being able to earn BAT incentivizes fraud, and fraud protection cannot be done well without a significant loss of privacy.
There's no way to confirm that you've watched an ad, you can write a Python script that pretends to be the Brave browser and sends the right requests to their API, and there's no way to distinguish those two on their side. The easiest (if not the only) way to make this difficult is to require lots of tracking and fingerprinting, which is hard to emulate well with a custom script. This is one major reason why tracking is so crucial for the ad economy to work.
I don't get your point.
There is no way to confirm whether you've watched an ad with existing systems either. Ad impression / click / PPC fraud is rampant, and adtech is in a perpetual battle to detect and prevent it.
A solution like BAT isn't meant to address fraud. It's meant to address user privacy and monetization of web services by serving ads that don't track the user, and by allowing the user to directly support the services they use.
The fact advertisers have inserted themselves as middlemen between consumers and producers for decades now has corrupted all forms of media, not just the internet. The solution by Brave is not perfect, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Without such solutions user privacy and experience on the internet will inevitably continue to degrade, as publishers optimize creating content specifically designed to please advertisers, and adtech optimizes systems designed to extract as much data from users as possible.
Advertising is an absolute scourge on humanity. As we move towards a transhumanist future, I shudder to imagine the machiavellian ideas adtech has in store for us. They've already experimented with face and eye tracking, and I'm sure they're thinking of ways of injecting ads directly into our brain... We should be open to any alternative solution that steers us away from this future, even if it's not perfect.