this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Isn’t that exactly what brave did? I wasn’t a fan of their “watch ads to get BAT” system either, but the alternative was always to just buy BAT with actual money. I’d rather see Mozilla work with brave to collaborate and improve on the BAT strategy than to start another competing standard, personally.
Does buying BAT compensate websites? AFAIK, no sites actually signed up to be compensated that way, so it just ended up being a random cryptocurrency. Brave went crypto first, websites second, and that obviously didn't work.
Mozilla should do the opposite IMO. Go out and make agreements with major sites to make their content available w/o ads for compensation, and then get users to start using that service. What they use for payment isn't particularly important to me, but it should be stable and low-cost. I think GNU Taler is a good start to keep costs really low (no money is actually changing hands), and Mozilla can settle up with websites monthly, quarterly, etc.
It should be Brave collaborating w/ Mozilla, not the other way around, because Brave obviously has weird motivations. Brave can keep BAT to reward watching ads, I just don't think they should use the same system for rewarding ads vs compensating websites for not showing ads.
I’d also love if they could do it this way, but I just don’t think it’s realistic tbh. In brave’s system it’s just up to the specific content creator to accept rewards - someone on YouTube could opt in without requiring google themselves to stop showing ads on the site in general (not gonna happen imo). Also, it’s not a reality I’m happy with, but Firefox and brave together are negligible for websites compared to chrome (65% of users use chrome 😭) so expecting websites to globally remove ads for non-chrome specific features is unlikely. Web devs could show ads based on user agent, sure, but that’s more work for the devs themselves compared to just blocking the ads and allowing them to say yes or no to be rewarded for their content.
BAT vs taler wise, I personally don’t care - I feel like the system works with either, so if they wanted to stick with BAT or switch it up I’d be happy either way. The part that’s important for me is the ability to reward creators independently from the websites that host them - like rewarding both is great, but in the case a website hasn’t/won’t done the work to disable ads (cough cough YouTube, Facebook/ig, etc)I still think creators should be able to benefit from the system. The last time I used BAT (which was very early after it launched tbh, things may have really changed) you could buy BAT (or watch ads for it, but the experience was truly shit and I immediately turned it off) and donate directly to websites (I gave some to Wikipedia iirc) or creators (I don’t watch YouTube but I heard some had signed up on there) or just let brave watch the time you spent on sites and divide your BAT between them proportionally monthly(?). Literally the only downside was like you said, adoption wasn’t incredible back then - but keep in mind that Firefox has 2.74% of users and brave is a rounding error. Firefox coming on board could dramatically increase engagement if all websites have to do is say “yea sure” to getting money from a small subset of their users, but I just really don’t see the majority of devs bothering to write new logic and fundamentally change their sites for the fraction of the Firefox+brave users who choose to donate (who are already a tiny fraction of their traffic).
Endgame ofc I agree should be to make tracking ads a thing of the past, but tbh I just don’t see the benefit of convincing websites to stop but only for a fraction of their users - like if you stumbled onto a random website and saw they said they’d opted into the program and wouldn’t track you / show ads… would you disable your adblocker? Imo until a system like this gets EXTREMELY wide adoption we have to be using adblocker anyway, so expecting devs to do a lot of work just so we can run the blockers on their page seems less than ideal to me.
@felsiq @sugar_in_your_tea
IMO a solution that doesn't use a blockchain is better. The premise of a blockchain is that either (1) everybody keeps a copy of every website everyone visits, or (2) there's a trusted party (or parties) somewhere that compresses the database.
We already have trusted parties on the web, and recording that much duplicate data is bad both for resources (bandwidth, energy consumption, disk usage) and for privacy.
There's a whole field of blockchain forensics and it will get even more interesting as quantum computers with more qubits start spinning up.
Really sites and visitors just have to agree on a signed bill/receipt and hand the transaction over to any existing payment processor.
Your other points are absolutely valid, but privacy-wise I’d much rather have my data associated with an anonymous wallet ID than any payment linked to my real identity
@felsiq
Good point thanks for catching that. The receipt itself can name any anonymous identifier like a crypto address. I was just intending to note that the blockchain is essentially a wasteful timestamp server that doesn't seem needed for this application.
As a practical matter, the website has your IP, when you visited, what you looked at etc. So you already have to trust them with your privacy. And there's a question of whether public policy would allow web traffic to be untraceable by default. But certainly the payment processor doesn't need to know things like which websites you visit.
Minor correction: the website has my VPN’s IP 😂 I don’t trust random websites with shit, personally. The payments not being tied to your real identity would also not make the web any more or less private than it currently is - just the alternative would remove privacy. Again tho, I’m not tied to crypto specifically and would be perfectly happy with any payment system that maintained user privacy. I just don’t want to see a feature roll out that gets people jailed for visiting lgtbq+ sites or some shit when their payment providers are controlled by fascist governments
@felsiq
> that gets people jailed for visiting lgtbq+ sites or some shit when their payment providers are controlled by fascist governments
If that's your threat model, then there may be an additional threat of timing analysis on the blockchain.
If your threat actor has the resources of a nation state and is able to tap your ISP, the site's ISP, and your VPN's ISP, then you probably also don't want a permanent pseudonymous record of your activity in the form of a blockchain.
This is just an initial thought; I don't have any concrete reason to believe that blockchain forensics + timing analysis is any stronger than just one of those on its own.