Useful Crypto Projects — Brave Browser
By Cryptohumanities.io
Brave’s mottoes are evocative of an internet that is broken: You Deserve a Better Internet & Take Back Control with Brave. So Brave is working to remedy this problem in two fell swoops.
First of all, Brave blocks all third-party, privacy-compromising ads and trackers, then enables users to opt-in to view privacy-respecting, Brave-approved ads whilst getting paid for it (in BAT: Basic Attention Token). Secondly, Brave provides a platform whereby content creators can verify their own website and various other online profiles in order to get paid for their content in BAT.
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As awareness rises that the internet suffers from a privacy-related tragedy of the commons, alternatives for safer, privacy-respecting methods to browse the internet are beginning to emerge. Today, the internet is largely controlled by a handful of massive, profit-seeking corporations which harbour disdain for anything resembling online privacy. As reported by multiple sources: data is the new gold or oil or insert precious commodity here. But Brave and an ever-growing multitude of internet users believe that user data should not be a free-for-all and are preparing to take back control.
While the topic of internet privacy is much too large of a topic to get into any detail here, one can rest assured that by choosing a privacy respecting browser and search engine (Brave is partnered with DuckDuckGo) one begins to regain control of their data. Brave even has a “private window with Tor” built into it, which hides not only your history but masks your location from the sites you visit by encrypting your connection and routing your browser traffic through several servers before it reaches your destination.
At its core, Brave is in a fight against modern ad-tech. A good starting point to better understand the privacy-invading pervasiveness of modern ad-tech is given in this Whatbitcoindid interview with Brave founder Brendan Eich.
Brave blocks all third-party ads and trackers when its “Shields” are switched on. Furthermore, if opted in, Brave pays its users in BAT to view Brave-approved ads. As can be expected from this disruption to the status quo, there has been some pushback — evident through a cease and desist letter filed by the Newspaper Association of America (which Brave responds to here). Interestingly, The Washington Post, one of the original signers of the cease and desist letter is now a Brave verified creator!
Brave-approved ads will be rolled out in two phases. Phase 1 is for user-facing ads. If you opt-in, you can earn BAT through pop-up ads, which appear as notifications on your device. On Windows 10 computers, for example, the ads appear as system notifications. On my smartphone, they appear as background notifications. Brave users receive 70% (in BAT) of the ad-revenue generated from the pop-up ads. The other 30% goes to the Brave team. The number of ads you receive and what type is entirely configurable and it is also possible to opt-out entirely, by way of a single toggle switch — wherein one can continue using the Brave browser and all of its privacy-related functions. There is also an option to have a Sponsored ad appear on Brave’s homepage. I have it turned off though, opting instead for a rotation of Brave-curated images.
In Phase 2, which should be rolled out soon, Brave plans to implement Publisher-Integrated Ads (i.e. ads on your own website or channel). In this implementation, Brave content creators will receive 70% of the ad revenue and the remaining 30% will be evenly split between Brave users and the Brave team.
All in all, I find the pop-ups rather annoying and a quick internet search will suggest that I am not alone in this. The ads are distracting— but I guess that is the point, as we are getting paid for this. The pop-up ads hang around for a few minutes (too long) but there is an option to close them by clicking the X. And just to be clear, you do not have to actually click on the ads to get paid, although Brave does invite people to do so if they find a particular ad appealing.
The best part about Brave ads though is that they are privacy-respecting, unlike the aforementioned standard in ad-tech today. Furthermore, Brave claims to never collect any personal user information and says that your browsing activity never leaves your device. Brave’s ad-matching occurs directly on the device at hand and is based on your individual location and browsing activity. For the interested, here is an edited list of the ads that I have received over the last 7 days (which Brave provides for user oversight): Proton, Ledger, eToro, Amazon, Lenovo, Crocs, eBay and a myriad of crypto-related products and services.
Earned BAT can be kept, converted into fiat, or another crypto token (which requires KYC/AML with Uphold or Gemini); or as encouraged by Brave, distributed to content creators. There is even an auto-contribute function, which will automatically distribute your BAT to any Brave verified sites that you visit.
Now for the fun part: in the time that I have been using Brave Rewards, I have earned around 180 BAT on my PC and about 70 BAT on my smartphone. Most of this has been through viewing ads, but some of it I earned through content creation, which I will explain below. In total, I have earned about 250 BAT. At current prices of around €0.20 per BAT, this amounts to around €50 over the course of 8 months of using Brave on my PC and smartphone. Decent. Of course, in addition to these earnings, Brave has also blocked around 350000 trackers and ads (not a typo!), saving me some bandwidth, battery on my phone, and about 5 hours of my attention. These stats are displayed on the browser homepage as a reminder of just how toxic the internet has become.
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Brave’s second objective is to change how online content creators are rewarded for their work. Upon setting up a Brave Creator account, you can add various payment channels from personal websites to Youtube, Twitch, Twitter, Vimeo, Reddit, and Github accounts. I am hopeful (and certain) that this offering will expand as Brave continues to develop its platform. I verified my own personal website at cryptohumanities.io and all in all it was a fairly simple process which I accomplished by following this tutorial.
There are currently well over 800 000 verified Creators on Brave. Some are rather well-known such as the earlier mentioned Washington Post; as well as, The Guardian, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and Wikihow. Youtubers take the lions share of verified creators with about half the total, while Twitter is in a distant 2nd place with slightly more than 100 000 verified Creators. All of this information is listed on Brave’s Transparency site and on a handful of other websites unaffiliated with Brave, which sometimes offer even more detail: Batgrowth and Bravebat, for instance.
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Brave’s BAT runs on the Ethereum network. The Brave prototype, however, was initially launched on the Bitcoin network but congestion there nearly led to Brave’s failure. I wish that Brave went for another network only because I do not enjoy messing around with Ether gas limits when transacting (thankfully most gas limits are automatically calculated these days). Scalability and congestion issues are not unique to Bitcoin anyway, as even Ethereum has had its issues as seen during the CryptoKitties craze.
Many crypto projects launched an ICO to raise money they didn’t need to create a token that wasn’t needed. Brave is one of the few exceptions to this as the project has a clearly outlined use case for the token. It is no surprise then that the BAT ICO sold-out in 30 seconds raising $35 Million.
I have issues with the token sale which only saw tokens sold to about 130 buyers — although many more were interested. This has resulted in a rather centralized ownership of the token which is not good given the intent of decentralized systems. There should have been limits set! The BAT Ethereum address is found here and a pie chart of the token holders here. In the latter, you can see that the top 100 addresses hold about 75% of the tokens. Of course one can never be sure if 1 person holds multiple addresses or multiple people share one address.
I have used the Brave browser since its stable release and I am a huge fan. The idea of directly participating in an internet economy is really cool. Of course, the daily/monthly active user numbers are not quite there yet but Brave’s continued growth across these metrics is assuring.
As Brave aims for transparency they have no issue with sharing the number of Brave users which is listed on their Transparency site. As of September 2020, Brave has about 6.5 million DAU and 20 million MAU. Of course, these numbers are small when compared with the browsers of the internet titans such as Google’s Chrome, used by billions every day, but Brave is ready to take them on.
Brave has a very solid community on Reddit where the Brave team is very active. For some reason, there are two Brave channels on Reddit: r/brave_browser and r/BATProject which have a lot of overlap in both content and users. For the non-Redditors, there is also a community forum on the Brave website as well as a Telegram channel, which no longer allows user messages but continues to post events.
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- ** I have no affiliation with Brave and receive no kickbacks or otherwise from this review. If you do decide to try Brave, use my download link here, for which I do get paid. If you have installed the browser and want to test out in-browser tipping, head to my website www.cryptohumanities.io and tip me some BAT.
