4 sats \ 5 replies \ @timechain 26 Nov 2022 \ parent \ on: The Problem of Using Attention as a Currency bitcoin
I hate to say it, but Brendan Eich's (Javascript, Mozilla Firefox) Brave & Basic Attention Token (BAT) model was interesting. Of course it didnt work because they made a shitcoin. But they came up with an interesting idea. Imagine instead of a sats/min, (like Fountain) a total sats/month, (like Brave/BAT) and the app figures who gets how much of it.
You earned the BAT tokens... by watching ads of course, but in this model, only Brave learns stuff about you, and tries to block trackers and cookies, giving you tokens to give out to support creators.
Websites and content creators registered. You set an amount of BAT tokens per month to give to all creators you visited during the month, and at the end of the month, it would distribute to "Brave Creators" in proportion to the amount of time spent there.
Of course in the end, both your browser and the websites were still spying on you and Brave found a way to print money. But the setting a monthly amount and it being dispersed by time spent was an interesting idea for a few years ago. It fights the "mental cost" by being something you only set once and forgot about. It even funded itself. (Thru "tokenomics" (a ponzi) and a few advertisers.)
does it all come down to the platforms hosting the files having overheads and costs of servers, electricity, employees, brick and mortar etc. Would this change if there was a way to self host your own content on a personal server and a platform for people to serch it somehow and listen/ read/ view from your personal server to their device. That way, the content could truly be FREE (as in beer), because you're baring the costs involved with hosting..?
reply
I found the browser extension AddSlice a good way to earn SATS for mi attention. It's like Brave but with Bitcoin instead a shitcoin.
reply
Yes, it was the right idea (or at least going in the right direction), but creating your own currency for it is unethical, of course.
The Gab/Dissenter guys created a fork a while back to replace BAT with sats, but I think it was discontinued. Used to be called Dissenter browser, I believe. Imho it was too early. I'd love to see another effort now, or soon.
reply
Yeah I heard about Dissenter. I like the idea of a (uncensored) comment section for anywhere on the internet. With an interoperable comment section being a thing for podcasts through the Podcasting 2.0, I wonder if we will see the same thing for everywhere online.
I think the "pick an amount for the month to give and let it be distributed in proportion to the time you spent on each site" method might have been a good idea. Maybe Alby will try it, although they kinda seem more like a Bitcoin Metamask than a Bitcoin Brave Browser. But maybe they will try it.
reply
Alby has allowances per site; I'd love to see a global one. Hard to do in a way that won't be gamed/abused, though.
reply