Brave launches 1.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#421

Post by PKop » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

Drakim wrote: post #391

PKop wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would either end users want to put $ into BAT, or content creators accept BAT in lieu of dollar given the massive volatility of BAT relative to $? If I had stocked up my wallet with $ over the summer, those $'s I exchanged could be up to about 35% less now. We're discussing saving pennies on transaction costs while we lost massive amounts on exchange rate slippage and volatility. This is ridiculously silly, why w…

These are common criticisms against cryptocurrency in general, and the answer is pretty much this: Normally, to accept digital donations, I'd need to have something like a Paypal account, and follow their terms of service (or that of another company like Patreon). If I do anything that company doesn't like, like produce and sell fireworks or draw porn, they will forbid me from using their service and users will be un…

Absolutely, and so we're back to (in my opinion) the main valid arguments for cryptocurrency: censorship resistant transactions, and store of value through absolute scarcity immune to political desire to debauch fiat money.

The second case arguably devolves, game-theory wise to the market never valuing subsequent new currencies with much significance compared to Bitcoin. It's the same argument I made above, just replace Bitcoin for $. Why hold BAT if some new crypto might come along and be better. Opening oneself up to appeals to new, "better" currencies based on features means there's never any trust, incentive to, or faith in holding current ones. Those that take this to logical conclusion will only/mostly value Bitcoin.

There will always be some floor on many of these currencies based on censorship resistance, but again that's niche relative to addressable market... and those who in their own minds won't get kicked off payment processors won't have use for a less censorable one. Of course, BAT is less decentralized than Bitcoin so not sure it's immune to political influence (we know who runs Brave).

Donations generally can be achieved with Bitcoin of course. Micro-payment currencies being stable relative to alternatives is the point of contention here. I don't see stability coming anytime soon, therefore I don't see large adoption either. I'll happy to be surprised though.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#422

Post by abainbridge » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

readams wrote: post #370

harikb wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that your eyeballs are something like $200/month. You are just not likely to pay that money. When you factor in money thrown away at bot/fraud, advertisers spend a shit load of money just to reach you (and indirectly pays for a whole lot of entertainment tv-shows/web-content)

Here's average revenue per user (per year) for many top companies. https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every... For anyone who is a user of multiple brands, you need to add these numbers.

Interesting link. I'm not sure how to interpret these numbers though. It says Amazon gets $752 per user per year. But this seems like it is nothing to do with how much my eyeballs are worth - people give Amazon money in return for stuff. The only other brand on that list I use is Google. I'm outside the US, so it appears my eyeballs are worth $137 per year. That is an amount I'd be prepared to pay if it made adverts go away and the money was split between the content providers I do use. But it isn't really clear (to me) how the old guy on YouTube who restores the antique furniture would collect his 75% share due to my eyeball time.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#423

Post by fuu_dev » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

bvda wrote: post #26

judah wrote: post #13

I've been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It's really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today. For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards: - You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if…

I wonder why they chose to use (yet another) crypto currency for this.

Its about economics, with creating their own currency they have full control over the system and also get all the transaction/service/etc fees.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#424

Post by a3_nm » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

judah wrote: post #13

I've been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It's really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today. For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards: - You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if…

Sorry, this must be very basic but I've never been able to make sense of one thing about Brave's model. You say that users can get paid in BAT to watch ads. But Brave is open-source. So is there anything preventing me to fork the browser to pretend to display the ads and reap the rewards without actually displaying them? Doesn't this break the whole system?

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#425

Post by PKop » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #382

PKop wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transac…

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, th…

>If it's BAT that I trade for my content..

This is just pushing the problem one step removed.

Is it not only relevant what you trade for your groceries?

If you can find someone to take BAT for that, in stable exchange rates, then your point stands.

If you have to acquire $ then what the exchange rate is for $ to BAT comes back into relevance.

Again, perpetually trading BAT back and forth for showing ads/watching ads is restating my premise about holding BAT.

Whether people will be willing to do so greatly depends on exchange rates and volatility.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#426

Post by __jal » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

asdkhadsj wrote: post #351

harikb wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that your eyeballs are something like $200/month. You are just not likely to pay that money. When you factor in money thrown away at bot/fraud, advertisers spend a shit load of money just to reach you (and indirectly pays for a whole lot of entertainment tv-shows/web-content)

Man that's rough. You're right, my content is way not worth that. It's odd to me though. I could pay for content I care about at an amount far smaller than $200/m, and the content creators would make more from me I imagine. Why the extreme overhead? There's no way some blogger is making $200/m off of a handful of clicks from me. I'd be shocked if they made $5/m directly from me. So where is the disconnect? (sidenote,…

Google has a market cap of 894.52B at this point in time. For instance.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#427

Post by dorgo » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

PKop wrote: post #291

triclops200 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume to limit how much transaction costs for microtransactions from many users. Credit cards are awful for small transactions, so you buy a bulk of BAT every month to reduce transactional overhead and then let creators cash out when they have some threshould of BAT. They could have done it way simpler than a cryptocurrency, though, by just using a floating point number in a database somewhere, but I'm assuming…

>so you buy a bulk of BAT every month Why is nobody considering the exchange rate volatility here? Endless comments about saving a few pennies, while massive depreciation from holding large quantities in volatile crypto blow away any benefit of not using dollars.

volatility is just a risk, a possibilty to loose money/value. Or even to gain. Transaction costs, on the other hand, are a certainty.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#428

Post by tzs » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

readams wrote: post #373

petemill wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decisions are all done locally by your browser on your computer.

I'm sure there are no attack targets for malware here.

Can't you make the exact same argument for people using Firefox or Chrome? That malware on your computer might be able to get at your browsing history is a risk with all browsers, not just Brave.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#429

Post by lern_too_spel » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

KKPMW wrote: post #264

lern_too_spel wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I f…

But nobody is holding anything hostage. When you use Brave, you can opt-in to display ads on your Browser, and while doing so still get ads from Brave. So the choice to cut-off ads from the content publisher is yours. If you think it's unethical - just do not block the ads.

Brave is holding the publisher's monetization hostage. Again, my issue is not with the user but with Brave.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#430

Post by jancsika » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

denismi wrote: post #381

fastball wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?

There's also: Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network It isn't clear to me from the website what happens if the publisher is unaware or unable or unwilling to claim revenue generated through this fringe browser's alternative revenue mechanism. Who ends up with that money? Is advertising even shown? Is the user aware of whether or not the publisher is in a…

> Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network

Unfortunately, that is likely not an optimally ethical reference state for the browser. Navigating with no ad blocker leaves the user open to all kinds of nasty tracking, auto-loading, and general trickery. When taken together that shady behavior can be seen by a reasonable person to outweigh the benefits of maximizing revenue for the user's favorite sites.

Case in point: if I want to open a pdf music score from IMSLP, IMSLP displays an ad with the prominent text "Download PDF" in it. If I follow the ad it eventually prompts me to install a Chrome extension. Do you think it's wise to install that extension?

In general I trust that IMSLP is an ethical site-- after all, they've spent a lot of effort to ensure that nobody downloads a score that is still under copyright in the country where the user is located. Did they forget to check a box to disallow misleading ads for their site? If there's no such checkbox "preferred network" is quite a euphemism and the correct/ethical reference state for browsers is with ublock origin installed.

Edit: just to be clear-- 2 could still be worse than 1 depending on how Brave browser behaves. But for most practical uses of the web by non-technical users, your 0 is almost always a worse ethical choice than 1.