Brave and BATs: browse with privacy and receive free tokens

Everyone wants to watch you, or at least, watching your digital activity. Believe it or not, that’s valuable information. For starting, it can help advertisers providing you with products that might really interest you. Therefore, you might be more inclined to buy. That’s why we have things like cookies —to learn users’ behavior. And that’s why the Brave Browser and the Basic Attention Token (BAT) were born.

During the Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) frenzy in 2017, not everything was bad. Some useful and interesting blockchainBlockchain is a type of database storing an immutable set of data, verifiable to anyone with access to it —through... projects came out from there, and Brave is one of them. This is a new Chromium-based browser (like Google Chrome or Firefox) that blocks ads, cookies, cross-site trackers, “and other creepy things” when navigating on the Internet.

Brave Browser assures you privacy, but that’s not all. It also rewards you (with real money) for your attention. In the beginning, they used Bitcoin (BTC), but they promptly developed an ERC-20 token (Ethereum-based) called Basic Attention Token (BAT). This one is, currently, a currency like any other, with a total market capitalization of over $1.1b and a price of around $0.70 per token.

Brave privacy features

Let’s begin with privacy. Brave was specially designed to be a private and open-source browser, so, you won’t find there any kind of ad or tracker, even if the original webpage has a lot of them. When navigating on Brave, you’ll find the characteristic lion icon in the right corner of the addressAn address is a blockchain equivalent to a bank account number in the traditional financial system, or an email address.... More bar —along with the URL or webpage address.

If you click on it, they’ll show you and explain to you how many ads and/or trackers have been blocked. A warning is also included:

“Sites often include cookies and scripts which try to identify you and your device (often embedded into ads). They want to work out who you are and follow you across the web — tracking what you do on every site. Brave blocks these things so that you can browse without being followed around.”

You can visit all the Internet like this, including popular sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The ad-blocking even includes the frequent ads that interrupt videos on the last platform. More than this, the user can set levels for blocking ads, trackers, and cookies; ranging from “Disabled” to “Aggressive” or “Strict”.

Additionally, since 2020, Brave has included the option to navigate in Tor private windows. This year, the new feature was support for IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). This technology lets the users connecting directly to a P2P (person-to-person) network, like BitTorrent, instead of central providers.

Rewards in Basic Attention Token

As you may know, web ads are an important stream of funding for a lot of sites online. Brave almost eliminates this possibility, so, in compensation, you can tip automatically all the websites you visit (or your favorite ones) by using their native currency, the Basic Attention Token (BAT).

This is a cryptocurrencyA digital currency running on a blockchain and built with cryptography. Contrary to central-bank issued currency, cryptocurrency issuance rules are... with real-world value (around $0.70 per token, like we mentioned before), exchangeable for traditional money in at least 100 crypto-exchanges globally, including Alfacash. But wait. Does this mean that you’ll need to obligatory buy BATs to reward the content creators when using the browser? No. Not at all. Let us sum it up a bit.

First of all, using Brave is completely free, and you can even get rewards in BATs as well. The process is cyclic. Once you download the browser on your PC, they’ll present to you the Brave Rewards system. As a common user, you can enable (or not, if you don’t want to) the “Ads” section to start viewing some desktop ads every now and then and receive free BATs for it.

These ads aren’t included on the websites when you’re browsing. Instead, they’ll appear as a small pop-up in the lower right corner of your desktop or home. They’re also customized, according to your preferences. So, you’ll always find products and services that might really interest you. All you need to do to receive the rewards in BAT is watching them briefly (if you buy it or not, it doesn’t matter). And that’s it.  

The amount may vary, but you can get paid between 0.010 and 0.05 BATs ($0.007 – $0.035) per every ad watched. The platform lets you choose how many ads you want to watch per hour, from one to five. So, for example, if you use the browser for 4 hours daily during 22 days, at 5 ads per hour, that would mean up to $14 in BATs monthly. The payments are set for 5-6 of every month. It’s not bad as a passive income, while in other browsers you won’t receive anything but ads.

Tipping content creators with BATs

Of course, you can keep for yourself all your BATs, but you can also tip them on choice. Just below the “Ads” section, you’ll find the “Auto-contribute” section. You can set there a monthly payment for all the sites you visited. This amount will be distributedA distributed system is made of components that are running on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions... according to the attention percentage you dedicated to every site during last month. It can vary from 1 BAT to 20 BATs (split between all the sites), according to your preferences.

Likewise, you can choose to tip directly any amount you want to your favorite sites or content creators. However, we must mention there’s a little trick here. For the website or content creator to be able to receive the BATs, they must’ve registered first as Brave Creators. Anyone with their own website or social media account (on YouTube or Twitch, for example) can do this easily and start receiving cryptocurrencies from Brave.

On the other hand, every user can check at first sight if a website or content creator is registered on Brave. Remember that lion icon in the address bar? Well, next to it, you’ll find a small orange triangle. If it’s marked with the check symbol (✓), it means they’re registered on Brave. If not, you won’t be able to send them tips yet.

Clicking on the triangle will let you see your BAT walletA crypto wallet is a user-friendly software or hardware used to manage private keys. There are software wallets for desktop... and the “Tip” button if it’s available. Until now, according to BATGrowth, there are over 1 million registered creators. They include 543,000+ YouTubers, 128,000+ Twitter publishers, 84,000+ Redditors, 72,000+ authors from Twitch, and 73,000+ website publishers.

Wanna try it already? You can start earning today just by doing what you usually do: walk through the Internet.

Wanna trade BAT, BTCAn abbreviation for Bitcoin., and other tokens? You can do it safely on Alfacash! And don’t forget we’re talking about this and a lot of other things on our social media.

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