In order withdraw the BAT (Basic Attention Token) you earned from Brave browser, you will need to verify your identity. This is because of something known as Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations that help the government track money. It’s something that is frowned upon by crypto enthusiasts who value privacy, but is necessary for companies to be in good terms with particularly the US government.
How to enable BAT withdrawals through Brave
So, if you want to withdraw your BAT and allow it to be exchanged for cash, you will have to start at the “Brave Rewards” screen.
On the top right of side of the browser, there is a menu tab. Click it and then click “Brave Rewards.”
Next to your BAT total, there is a button that says “Verify Wallet,” click that.
Afterwards, it will take you to uphold.com where you enter personal information
Enter your address, phone number, etc. then it will ask you to scan a QR code on your phone
Open your phone’s camera and point it at the QR code
Make sure to either have a passport, ID card or Drivers License, then take a picture of it and upload it to uphold.com
The Verification process usually takes 24 hours during business days, but it could take longer than that.
How to turn BAT into cash
Uphold allows users to connect bank accounts as well as crypto wallets, so on their website all you will need to click is “send to bank account.” Ofcourse, you will have to set up your bank account which requires a routing number, account number and more verification time.
Once you select how much BAT you would like to send to the bank account, simply confirm the transaction. Before it is officially deposited, you will be charged an exchange fee of around 2%, and you will have to wait for your bank to accept the transaction, which can take up to 24 hours.
A good day for an alt coin is when they preform a tiny bit better than Bitcoin. Brave browser hit 10 million monthly active users, and people are claiming that the price of its integrated Basic Attention Token (BAT) pumped because of the news.
Here’s a comparison between BAT and BTC on the 15 minute chart today:
BTC is at the top and BAT is at the bottom. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t really jump for joy after seeing these results. Sure, BAT is a few more percentage points higher than BTC today, but it’s trading volume is $14 million dollars lower than a few days ago. In the typical altcoin fashion, volatility spikes mimic BTC almost as if they are the same asset.
With BTC volume sitting at $18 trillion and BAT volume at $46 million, it would be difficult that good BAT news could pump the BTC market. Usually, when BTC moves up, so do altcoins. Still, some Redditors on r/batproject are convinced that this move can be attributed to news about the Brave Browser.
“remember Bat token is one of the few tokens with a real use case via Brave and as such should grow as the Brave users increase,” said u/normanl29 on a post about the 4% price increase.
Surprisingly, most other comments on the post took the opportunity to point out how low the price is in the macro perspective.
“Yeah we saw what growth from 0 to 10M users did to the price…,” said u/punis1.
“thanks sold 100k,” u/coladh_samh responded.
Even Mike Dudas, who’s publication, The Block, reported on the increase of price mentioned that they haven’t found it to be worth entering the BAT system.
“Anecdotally, I’ve heard the payments are very low for publishers and users. We haven’t opted into the system, as it wouldn’t be material for us.,” Said Dudas.
Personally, I have tired using the Brave browser but on MacOS it seems to be lacking in many areas. There isn’t an easy to use PiP feature, battery life is worse than Safari, and when I turn on BAT rewards, video ads are sometimes a minute long or keep playing more ads until I refresh the page. I am the exact demographic who would love to support creators by donating BAT and wouldn’t mind running watching ads to earn money, but the browser keeps pushing me away, just like many others.
Brave, the web browser winning over the crypto community recently published research on their decentralized VPN. VPN⁰ is still being tested, but it promises to solve the risk of peer to peer hosting through other decentralized VPN solutions.
Why decentralize a VPN?
Many American crypto traders don’t like U.S. exchanges because they don’t let you lose your money quick enough. This pushes U.S. traders to purchase a VPN and access sites with margin like BitMex. Decentralized products generally don’t require identification to use, and anonymity is popular in that trading crowd.
Crypto enthusiasts also tend to be more familiar with the ability to keep others from selling your data. That is the main appeal of decentralizing a VPN. There are many VPNs who sell your data to third parties.
Right now you can choose a decentralized VPN that connects you to someone else in the world who might be doing illegal things with it, one that sells your data, or one that is pricier than a Netflix subscription.
Brave doesn’t discuss any subscription fees, but promises to be a solution for the first two issues mentioned.
How do they do it?
They do it by using long winded cryptographic techniques that I won’t bore you with. Essentially, it all boils down to this quote.
“VPN⁰ allows relay nodes to control which traffic they transmit, without learning what content it contains”
In order to make sure it worked for real world usage, they integrated their tech with ProtonVPN, OpenVPN and Mainline using a Raspberry Pi. Everything worked out, and they think they can beat out any competition.
“This post has presented VPN⁰, to the best of our knowledge, the first dVPN with strong privacy requirements and high performance.”
Speed of VPN⁰s zero knowledge calculation is the bottleneck they claim to be researching now. There is no release date, but if everything works like they say it will and is affordable, the product will likely win over crypto traders and blockchian enthusiasts.
One of my favorite things to do on Twitter is to look at replies to attention grabbing tweets. I assume this is what most media trained people do as it is so easy to post fake news, and comments will always have some sort of counter. Today I logged on, clicked a tweet and a message popped up saying, “some replies were hidden by the author.” Twitter’s leniency on censorship has been only reason I’ve never written my argument for decentralized social media, but this notification triggered my fingers.
There are a million reasons to decentralize things, but I will only expand on those that I am most familiar with.
What would decentralized social media look like?
In truly decentralized environments, things will (ideally) run themselves. This usually means a team of developers make an algorithmic based network on which people can send information to one another. If the design is updated, people have the option to stay on the non-updated version.
Developers need to be compensated for their time, so they usually add some sort of currency that plays a role in the network. I won’t act like I’m some sort of economist, but what I do know is that developers of large cap projects can pay their rent at the end of the month.
To keep it short, the dream scenario would be a platform that could never be taken down, users could choose which version they want and one that is worth developing.
Ownership of content
@ciakids:
“Every time the local news replies to a viral tweet with “hey can we use this footage” and the guy who tweeted it says “sure” and not “fuck off” or “pay me” I die a little inside.”
When I think of content ownership, I think of Basic Attention Token (BAT). Since I am neither an expert on BAT nor a psychic, I will predominantly talk about this from the perspective of current grievances rather than future solutions.
We’ve all seen a media outlet use citizen reporting to help break a story. Most of the time, a person who stumbles upon important information will not know what it’s worth and give it away for free. This is mostly because there isn’t a way to evaluate the worth of information within the short time that it is exclusive or relevant.
An environment like brave browser allows people to turn on ads and receive BAT in micro-payments. These micro-payments have the potential to create expendable income that is easier to donate online then to cash out. So unless a content consumer is really struggling to pay their bills, the BAT they receive from watching ads will sit in their browser’s wallet.
In an instance where an individual just reported exclusive information through a decentralized platform, they can turn on a paywall and charge $0.05 worth of BAT to those who would like to view it. This means that instead of a media outlet framing the original reporting inside of an article that they have ads placed on, they summarize the information, share a link and viewers can pay the $0.05 to see the original post if they would like.
Would decentralized social media promote freedom of speech?
I am your typical social justice warrior college student, but if people are being racist online, I want to see it. In my opinion, hiding things doesn’t make them go away.
On Twitter, accounts will be banned pretty quickly for using hateful language. This only means that Twitter has an accurate gauge of how many people in whichever area are ignorant and it is not available for the general public.
With Twitter implementing the ability for authors of tweets to hide whichever responses they want from the public, the least censored social platform is only becoming more censored.
Another way that decentralization can help free speech when businesses become controlled by governments. A government can ask website to block certain information by threatening to ban their website altogether. It is in the business’s best interest to block the information that they ask because some revenue and exposure is more profitable than none.
All-in-all, it seems that the more money an organization makes, the more they try to censor content within it. People need a place to go that is cool enough to put hatred in its place, but free enough to let it exist.
Organizations impose limits on acceptable content
This issue mostly revolves around YouTube, which in certain situations acts very similarly to a social media site.
Whether making commentary videos or vlogs, many content creators have been demonetized by YouTube for using bad words. Within the past five years, YouTube chose make it much more difficult to make money from creating mature content.
Suddenly, channels who had built a library that contained curse words had their work and success demonetized. This left them with the option of finding their own sponsors and forgoing YouTube ad revenue or censoring themselves.
YouTube is completely within their right to manage their site how they wish, but the sad part is that the creators had nowhere else to go.
On top of censorship, YouTube has had issues with automatically demonetizing or taking videos down for containing clips or sound from other sources. Algorithms are simply not capable of determining fair usage, so they automatically side with the copyright claim if the usage surpasses a certain criteria.
Music reaction videos are huge on YouTube and undeniably help promote artists, but neither the record labels or YouTube seem to care about the person who made the reaction. When record labels claim copyright on a video, YouTube’s algorithm will pick it up and forward all revenue from the video to the record label.
A decentralized platform would have no incentive to have an algorithm in place for these types of things, because they wouldn’t be making money from ads. Instead, the advertisers would be paying users directly for their time and have no affiliation with the content being played.
The money the viewer makes from watching ads would then ideally be donated partly to the person who made the reaction video, and partly to the artist if they had a wallet address.
Conclusion
There are many more reasons to decentralize social media than the ones I’ve listed, and my ideas likely have problems that I am not knowledgeable enough to think of. Regardless, freedom on the internet is trending downwards and the common factor is the interest of big business. The grassroot aspect of blockchain technology naturally leads to conversation of how we can distribute power, and media businesses are powerful.
Brave, the company behind a relatively new blockchain platform that’s run on an altcoin by the name of Basic Attention Token (BAT), has announced that it is giving away $1 million in Basic Attention Tokens in a new effort to spur adoption and use of the digital advertising solution.
