Live data from Hacker News

Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

news.bitcoin.com

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#11
post #3

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 n…

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.

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.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#12

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?

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

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#13
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.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#14

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.

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

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#15

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?

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

Alternative: microtip [1] [2].

[1] https://autotip.io/docs/microtip-meta-tag

[2] https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#16

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.

Well, since the goal is to make advertisers redundant, that's not really an issue.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#17

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?

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

You could refuse to serve to web browsers with a Brave user-agent. Or I could fetch your website using wget and strip out ads. If you can't control a user agent in other situations, why do you want to control it here?

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#18
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.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#20

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.

Or, rather, the business model changes to paying more and paying in more circumstances to avoid ads.

To encourage revenue, the ads might get more and more obnoxious.

Post reply on HN