Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments • Hacker News Board

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#21

Post by mike-cardwell » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

tiles wrote: post #17

mike-cardwell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't want to control the user agent, I just want to programatically announce that I am not talking part in the Brave micro-tip system, so that no end-user funds are put in a wallet for me which will never be withdrawn.

Looking into this further, they would eventually email me after there are $10 worth of funds queued up for me, and then after 30 days of me ignoring them, those funds would be spread out amongst other sites who do want them.

However, until that wallet has at least $10 in it, Brave is just sitting on top of free money. I don't want that.

[edit] P.S, Brave doesn't identify it's self in the user agent header. I just downloaded the Linux version and it identified it's self thus:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#22

Post by mst » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:00 PM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #12

mike-cardwell wrote: post #10

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?

How else would you suggest they maintain the infrastructure without turning the users back into the product?

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#23

Post by mike-cardwell » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

mst wrote: post #22

mike-cardwell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How else would you suggest they maintain the infrastructure without turning the users back into the product?

By taking a lot less than 5% of the donations and creating a successful and widely used product.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#24

Post by this_user » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:05 PM UTC

mootothemax wrote: post #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.

> That's the problem advertising faces; as soon as you encourage people with disposable income to avoid all advertising, the whole system becomes pointless.

And if you don't offer that option, more and more people will just block your ads for free.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#25

Post by andy_ppp » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:06 PM UTC

mootothemax wrote: post #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.

The problem with ads is that they are generally terrible. I quite like quality advertising, like this for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf0YXK6tQrM

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#26

Post by Brendinooo » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:08 PM UTC

mootothemax wrote: post #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.

I don't think that's an accurate way to portray it. I might be able to afford $5/month, but I'd rather buy five songs a month with that money. Ad-free Web viewing is a luxury, not a necessity.

Also, not all advertising targets disposable income. I might see an ad for clothing, which I would need to buy at some point. Maybe I'm underwater on my mortgage and want to learn one weird tip to get refinanced. Plenty of ads out there for that.

A more sinister angle is that there is a type of person who doesn't have a ton of disposable income because he's more susceptible to buying stuff that he sees in ads.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#27

Post by habosa » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:11 PM UTC

So it's like Google contributor, but it runs through Brave.

Brave is a story of how to take a good product and make it bad. It started out as "Link Bubble" which was one of the most innovative apps on Android. Brave bought it, introduced a number of bugs, and added "Brave Shields". These 'shields' generally break most sites around the web by blocking trackers and, more importantly, replacing website ads with ads that pay Brave.

Note: I work for Google but have nothing to do with Google contributor.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#28

Post by tokenizerrr » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:12 PM UTC

mst wrote: post #22

mike-cardwell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How else would you suggest they maintain the infrastructure without turning the users back into the product?

What infrastructure is there to maintain? Conceptually all that needs to happen is:

* Website sends HTTP response header containing a bitcoin address

* Browser keeps a bitcoin wallet

* Browser shows a button to send bitcoin from said wallet to said bitcoin address

And that's it.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#29

Post by tokenizerrr » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #21

tiles wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't want to control the user agent, I just want to programatically announce that I am not talking part in the Brave micro-tip system, so that no end-user funds are put in a wallet for me which will never be withdrawn. Looking into this further, they would eventually email me after there are $10 worth of funds queued up for me, and then after 30 days of me ignoring them, those funds would be spread out amongst oth…

> Looking into this further, they would eventually email me after there are $10 worth of funds queued up for me, and then after 30 days of me ignoring them, those funds would be spread out amongst other sites who do want them.

And this means the users, who think they are contributing to you, actually aren't at all. This seems deceptive.

Re: Brave Browser Adds Bitcoin Payments

#30

Post by mike-cardwell » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

tokenizerrr wrote: post #28

mst wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else would you suggest they maintain the infrastructure without turning the users back into the product?

What infrastructure is there to maintain? Conceptually all that needs to happen is: * Website sends HTTP response header containing a bitcoin address * Browser keeps a bitcoin wallet * Browser shows a button to send bitcoin from said wallet to said bitcoin address And that's it.

Yes, that is ideally how it would work. Yes, they have infrastructure which needs paying for, but that infrastructure only exists in the first place so that they can take a cut of the donations.