Basic Attention Token, or BAT, as it's the name of the token, is yet another attempt at disrupting the so-called "attention economy" by using the blockchain. Backed by an impressive technical team (Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla is the leading character in this team) BAT made some impressive progress lately.
They just recently announced they'll start including YouTubers in their BAT payment program. If you don't know how this work, well, it's a bit like Patreon. You set up a monthly quota that you wish to donate from your wallet (which means you, as a consumer, have to buy those tokens first) and then Brave, the browser, will distribute those tokens based on the amount of time you spend on each of the sites enrolled. That's pretty much it, except with today's release, Brave can automatically detect the author of a YouTube video, no matter where that video is embedded, which is pretty bad ass, if you ask me.
So, I decided to take Brave for a spin. Below it's a screenshot of steem.supply consumed form Brave. You can see the 3 ads from anonymous ads blocked and also the JSEcoin mining script disabled. Neat :)
Here are my thoughts after about one hour of using it:
- it's fast (I'm writing this from a Brave browser)
- it's clean, it really looks and feels neat
- it's still a bit rough around the UX, some settings can be placed in different areas, but this is normal, as it is a very new product. I expect a lot of the UX to change as the product matures and there's more of a user base to draw feedback from
- it does block a lot of ads ads and scripts, so if you're looking for an integrated browser + ad blocker, I think this is your choice
- it's stable (not a single crash in one hour, although at times it felt a bit sluggish)
I still don't have any BAT tokens or any other crypto in my wallet, so I can't say anything about the actual rewarding process, but, if time permits, I will test that too in the near future.
All in all, a neat piece of software.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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