Brave
What do you call a company that uses Google's own open source software to try and dethrone Google as the King of Ads?
Brave
=)
While on my walks today I have been giving this company and browser a lot of thought. It seems like a use case for cryptocurrency that fits amazingly well.
First of all, they make a killer browser all by itself. Brave focuses heavily on user privacy and their browser is basically an ungoogled chrome. With ad blocking. And tracker blocking. And fingerprint blocking. And, well, you get the deal.
But what does this browser do and how does it dethrone Google?
It cuts out the middlemen
Basic Attention Economy
A really famous guy once said:
A wealth of information creates a poverty if attention
That's basically adds on the internet. Do you even notice ads anymore? I, for one, am totally ad blind.
Brave wants to fix that. In their browser they have a prowerful machine learning system that figures out what you spend your attention on. This way, you attention can be used on ads that you might actually care about.
Which leads to an interesting point. If Brave is so privacy focused, why are they selling all my data?
And this is where crypto comes into play
Zero Knowledge Proofs
A zero knowledge proof is basically Monero or any other anonymous cryptocurrency. The users are hidden, but the transaction is still verifiable.
Basically, I have a secret and you will beleive me just by saying I have a secret.
See this pretty cool explanation that ironically uses Google.
Anyway. This is the secret sauce. Brave can get advertisers really good data on user attention while completely protecting privacy. They use a zero knowledge proof to make it happen.
But how could you trust that they aren't just keeping the data? You can't. That's why it's on the blockchain. You don't need to trust it.
And I forgot to mention. They pay you in crypto for even seeing the ads. Sometimes 70% of what the advertisers pay.
Paying for your attention and selling it anonymously with crypto. That really is Brave.
