I like the principles behind Brave browser, but I don’t think users will ever truly “earn by surfing”
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Brave is a free web browser focused on keeping your web surfing private by automatically blocking advertisements and trackers. It in turn provides users the option of watching ads, paying for their attention in the form of a cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token (BAT). Users can contribute the collected BATs to websites and content creators, or download them to their wallet. Now here are the problems:
- For users, Brave supports only two wallets where to receive the collected BATs; these wallets have quite a bad reputation if you search online, being of low standards and suffering from several flaws.
- Each separate Brave browser in your different devices, and even each new Brave install on the same device, collects BATs from zero, making it very hard to achieve the amounts needed for withdrawal.
- As a content creator, I’ve also found it impossible to actually retrieve BATs.
- The price of the BAT is ridiculously low. Even online paid surveys, ad-viewing and other small side hustles pay better. And it’s strongly correlated to Bitcoin (see plot), which suggests that it hasn’t much intrinsic value.
- Last, Brave just added its own wallet, but, unbelievably, it cannot directly save the BATs you collect on Brave itself!!!
Clearly, the people developing Brave just don’t want you to really gain anything from surfing the web. Probably that’s why the BAT price is not only low but also strongly tied to the speculations on other cryptocurrencies.
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