Experiences with BAT

I've generally been fairly skeptical of cryptocurrency.  I don't doubt that there are applications for which blockchain is the perfect solution, but most of the use cases popularly mentioned are rather unconvincing.  I'm a lurker of /r/Buttcoin and found a lot of logic in the blog post by Ivan Ivanitskiy.

However, I am rather intrigued by what Brave and BAT are doing.  I run an ad-blocker because some sites are running ads that are just ridiculously obtrusive (and/or malicious).  But it's a real problem for how the internet gets funded.  A huge portion of the internet, mobile apps, etc are funded largely by ads, and the question of how digital content will be funded in the future is one of the biggest existential questions facing the internet today.  The work being done on acceptable ads is long overdue and helps address some of those problems.  But there is still a problem of misaligned incentives.  That is, Even if ads never tried to get you to install malware, and were never obnoxious, do users still have an incentive to not run ad blockers?  I don't know if it's perfect, but BAT gets closer than any solution I've seen so far to solving this problem.

But it's kinda broken at the moment due to the frustrations of getting going.  For example, I can't just set up a monthly deposit to keep my BAT wallet funded.  If you use Brave's preferred partner (Uphold), you currently have to transfer money to a fiat card first, then transfer it to a BAT card, then transfer it to Brave's wallet.  Not exactly simple.  Even worse, my MasterCard (Citi and Meijer ) and Visa (Amazon) declined the transaction to fund the fiat card.  Citi told me it was against their policy to allow cryptocurrency transactions.  I presume the other cards have similar rules/restrictions, though I haven't verified yet if that's why the transaction was declined (though I think Visa said something about needing manual verification).  I couldn't even add my Fifth Third or Cabela's MasterCards as funding methods in Uphold.  There was some kind of error.  I can't blame the financial institutions too much for this -- cryptocurrency is used so much for criminal activity, it's not unreasonable for them to be a little cautious.

But this poses a serious problem in adoption.  A lot of folks (especially millennials) don't want to pay anything for anything.  But if it's a pain to pay money to content providers, even when you are willing to pitch a few bucks their way, it makes the entire enterprise rather doomed from the start.  I think Brave has plans to allow you to fund your wallet directly in the browser -- and I think that's really what needs to happen to make the process as painless as possible for users.  Here's to hoping the process gets smoothed out in the future.

Edit: yes, I'm aware I don't have to use Uphold and can use whatever platform I want.  That's how cryptowallets work.  But, the only link in Brave's FAQ is documentation on how to setup Uphold.  I'd expect this is what most users would do.  Only users already comfortable with some other cyrptoplatform would know to do anything different.