A Brave new form of Crypto and Blockchain

Hello internet and Medium readers of the world.

I’ve given some straight up radio silence for almost the past year, which isn’t cool at all. Even my professor for the open source course I’m taking has been tugging me asking for my releases. All I can say is, it’s been tough — especially when you’re a young adult trying to figure out how to balance the time and life you’ve been given each day. But, what professor David Humphrey always reminds his students about, especially one of his potential proteges, one must willingly invest their time, use their waqt with the pride and attitude towards one’s craft. I suppose that can be the real difficulty, because truly focusing on your craft, which in my case is programming, blockchain businesses, and cryptocurrencies — has been a rocky road. I think the million unique distractions now, driving one away from what they must really do and with what’s really going on is what makes it so challenging. Distractions are a scary truth in the world we live in. Which gets me to crypto, when you look back to how the whole market operates, and how the prices of cryptocurrencies are deemed ‘volatile’, it’s interesting when you compare to the traditional markets of the world, the whole dynamic of it all. The distractions and mis-information that is birthed through the violent love of trading. There will always be ‘people’ behind the purchasing and selling of shares in a market, or in our case various automated robots AKA simple to severely complex programs which buy and sell at the perfect time. It’s important to remember, these ‘people’ are buying an asset of some kind, which is reflective of some underline product. When evaluating the crypto ecosystem at coingecko,
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple remain ultimately the most dominant, as they’ve been since the dawn of crypto in mass media. This is also a plug to see when looking back at this post, if coingecko has completely different coins in that list, or will even exist at all.

There’s a missing element in all this. The market has had billions of dollars poured into it *whether legitimate or ulterior means*, people are buying and selling like they do in the traditional market, fear is dominant, engineering, development, and conferences are all in full swing. But what’s really missing?

The product.

What will an average person who now owns a smartphone device, has an average wage, and other attributes, use to fundamentally interact with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Enter Brave. A browser created by the same team who created Mozilla, as well as Javascript. Backed by a diverse and all star cast with the likes of: Yan Zhu, Brian Bondy, and Brendan Eich. Their team is building some innovative and truly cutting edge software. When you think about it, we now do everything through the touch of a browser, whether its to look something up, social medias — and sure there are loads of applications out there now which are just layers on top of a browser, but browsers have been the benchmark of the internet. They are the connection from human being to the world wide web.

So what really is Brave, and where does it sit within the list of cryptocurrencies we see out there? The truth is, those are 2 separate things. On one hand we have the Brave browser, and on the other hand we have BAT, the Basic Attention Token. Built on the notion of capitalizing on a person or user’s attention towards content on the web. Now that’s just crazy, to make money for people’s attention on the internet? Wait a minute, doesn’t that exist already? Yes, but not really. See traditional advertisements are formed around a cost yield approach, given specific advertisements result in increased future content viewership, and increased customer ‘purchasing’ activity. The framework of this approach was a big hit since the 1920s, 30s — and well into the turn of the century, but this centuries long model is evidently slowly fading away. Let’s deduce this a bit, where do we see advertisements:

• Clickable Ads
• Social Medias
• Youtube
• Movies/Entertainment
• Commercials

To name a few. But now, how do all people interact with each of these medias, a browser. So then, what do we, users of the browser, provide to these medias? Attention. Every single one of these applications of current modern advertising is driven by the sole human action of utilizing time and focus on content, whether it be a Netflix film, a Youtube video, or instagram shot. BAT aspires to see a place in all this, one which is revenue cycle driven by the users looking at the content themselves, let the user have the power to decide what they want to see, and what they don’t want to see. In my long shot of trying to explain BAT, we will uncover what its real functionality on advertisements and micro-payments will be, but as a browser — disregarding the crypto stuff, it’s pretty darn cool.

Enter privacy, modern web technologies, and good ol’ HCI & UX.

Long story short, Brave Browser seems driven by a user, privacy driven, open source, and independent content management philosophy. Let’s take a look at their splash when you simply open up the browser:

There are some nifty things on here if you look closely. The UX to start with is beautiful, the colour scheme, how favourite or frequently visited pages only take up a third of space. Whilst surrounding all this information with a scenic, often updated photo of something. It’s almost like they took parts of the UX of Chrome, Opera, bing, and of course Firefox and Netscape — combined it, then upgraded it with some of the latest greatest open source tooling. If you notice further, there’s some unique information on here, data that you don’t usually see on your browser. Stuff like ‘trackers blocked’, ‘Ads block’ (depending on if you’re an adblock user), and HTTPS upgrades. The average browser user may not be familiar with these terms, but these are vital terms within the browser and developer world. Which gets me to the current target market of Brave browser, it’s best equipped for developer or avid technologists right now. I wouldn’t personally argue that it’s ready for mass users, the kinks and core features are still in need of handling edge cases, woes of cross platform, and overall payments functionality is still getting there, just looking at their Github issues list is like a cartoonish endless scroll:

You may notice that the top issue on that list is mine :) But a fairly basic issue to say the least, which is what really open source contributions start with. To take initiative in supporting the community and development of technologies us developers are interested in. This is the motto of the open source class I’m taking at Seneca College, with Professor David Humphrey, a course titled:
Open Source Project. As you can probably guess, the open source project I’m focusing my contributions on for this course is ‘Brave’, but more specifically their open source repo, browser-laptop. Which is the PC/laptop version of brave, one of the many platforms Brave runs on. Even specific to this, the project that interests me the most is ‘payments’, which is their technology stack that that securely manages and administers a BAT balance in a wallet embedded into the browser, as well as a ledger with ‘attention time’ associated with attention driven content. Here’s a quick peek of how it looks:

Pretty neat. Which browser has a recording of the time spent viewing content? This type of data, could lead to a lot of various applications and use-cases with the likes of BATs given to Youtube creators, Instagram models, PDFs, articles, books, probably much more. But it’s going to take some time to get there, one bug, issue, feature, and triage at a time. I thought I’d assist in this journey *given I can gladly force my self through a school course, so my professor won’t kick me, and my love for crypto*, and so I submitted a few PRs for my course releases:

Pull request for release one
Pull request for release two

What I’ve also learned, contributing towards open source, can evidently be so much besides just writing code. There’s documentation, testing existing bugs, and open your own bugs that you’ve noticed! Just like the simple issue I opened above, which turned out to be a duplicate — always check throughly when you open an issue friends. So I did exactly that, and will also include simple contributions like this to my releases: one, two, and three.

As the avid developer and fellow student or colleague can gather, my changes aren’t too serious. Which I very much accept, and leave this blog post with the goal to get serious about this now. All the time and attention we have vanishes by each passing day, it’s now or never. A personal message to my self, to get involved with more serious issues, and taking stabs at producing more code, and just maybe, finishing what I start.

Thanks fellow readers! See you next release blog post (which will be very soon, since i’m a bit behind).

Arsalan