Thanks for posting this. But, what does the ICO mean here? Are they some kind of shares of the company? Investors? What influence does that bring with?

If no one chooses to use their Basic Attention Token, will the project survive?

First, the ICO enabled them to raise money to hire a real team to develop the Brave browser and build out the ecosystem. They're on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS and Android already.

They're seeding the ecosystem by giving BAT away to users so they can start paying content creators: "Brave grants 300,000 crypto tokens to browser users"--https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-grants-300000-crypto-t....

BAT is an investment that the current situation with how advertising works on the web isn't sustainable--over 600 million users with ad blockers installed and climbing.

We know we need a way to pay for content that doesn't suck, so lets build it into the browser and make it a mostly automatic and anonymous, based on the amount of time spent on web sites.

In addition, the goal is for BAT to be used by advertisers to create a decentralized ad exchange where users who opt-in to watching privacy-respecting, quality-made ads get compensated in BAT (that's coming in the next 3-6 months.)

Users who chose to watch and receive BAT can then pay other content creators with it, including on Youtube.

Lastly, BAT is actively traded--the market cap is close to $349 million @ $0.39/BAT and over 16 million tokens in the past 24 hours: https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/basic-attention-to...

The thread was about how only the big guys can afford to make a browser but here's a startup that is going after Google's core business using Chromium's code.

Lots going on here; I can't do it all justice; this video should help--https://vimeo.com/209336437.

Plus the latest community update--https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7ljinb/bat_comm...