I think crypto in general is disastrous for our environment right now, and has offered none of the self-control finance benefits it promised due to ever more regulation (the EU is soon planning to ban private wallets, you can only legally host money on exchanges then, which basically means we're full circle to the old banking system). All this has been precipitated by the frantic speculators looking for a quick buck. Bitcoin wasn't invented to enable money-hoarding investors, it was designed to undermine the old banking system and give us back full control over our money. This aspect has been completely undermined by regulation now.
But BAT is a different beast as it doesn't use mining. So my concern is not the same as for general crypto schemes.
It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers. I just want the advertising industry to die and get out from between the content creators and consumers. I know this is not a realistic viewpoint but I'm not willing to contribute to it. Brave solves the privacy problem to some extent but not the ad problem. And in a way they even promote ads by paying users to view them.
Brave seems to be looking to make the current system more palatable (and of course become the gatekeeper for this new tech which would be priceless if it ever took off). I've long given up on the ad system completely. I already pay for the sites I like and use a lot (at least where they offer this option) but I don't make any exception for adblocking ever. Even when they're non-tracked.
> It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers.
The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks. The fact is that it's the simplest way for content providers to generate revenue, and that won't change overnight. What BAT is attempting to do is establish a market between content consumers and providers. The BAT wallet is funded either by attention, i.e. consuming ads, or by directly purchasing BAT. In that sense, the advertising middle-man could eventually be removed from the transaction.
Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects. We also need them to be friendly for content providers to integrate in order to boost adoption.
> The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks.
I agree, but it's not like I can't wish for it :)
> Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects.
I don't like being told how I should feel about something :) I don't celebrate them and I won't. For me the solution is ever more and ever more efficient adblockers, as well as bans on tracking like the EU is doing. This is something that does really work. Many sites are really seeing a drop in income from ads and are looking for alternatives now. Hurting someone in their wallet really works.
I think BAT is a dead-end, they don't have the market power to bring about this change, and the ideal outcome is only one of the possible ones around. Seeing as how you really do celebrate their solution but still don't use it illustrates the issue I see with it.
>the EU is soon planning to ban private wallets, you can only legally host money on exchanges then, which basically means we're full circle to the old banking system
They can try to "ban" whatever they want, but it's not happening.
Aside from some of the common critiques of purpose-oriented blockchain tech, I think there's a question with BAT of if creating a token-based ecosystem with this thing actually creates economic incentives that align with the overall improvement of our society, or if it merely contributes to the existing problems that have enabled intrusive ad tech in the first place.
On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.
How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.
I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.
But we have all this today. Just install an adblocker. Ads are hardly pervasive at all for me, I really rarely see them unless I go out on the street. On the internet adblocking is almost 100% effective and I don't watch live TV.
In fact I see people who are more wealthy not using adblockers and paywall bypassers because they feel like they should support the sites somehow. It's a similar thing with downloading video content, many of my better-off friends are not downloading because they are worried about content disappearing. They actually care about the overall economic model working. My friends from worse circumstances (I know many people in lesser-off countries) don't give a shit about that and download all they can get. And I agree with them.
I myself don't have this worry. Content will never disappear one way or another. We had content on the internet before ads were really a thing and it was better than it is now in many ways. And I like cutting into the big megacorps' profits.
