I'd assume to limit how much transaction costs for microtransactions from many users. Credit cards are awful for small transactions, so you buy a bulk of BAT every month to reduce transactional overhead and then let creators cash out when they have some threshould of BAT. They could have done it way simpler than a cryptocurrency, though, by just using a floating point number in a database somewhere, but I'm assuming they assume a distributed ledger is more secure somehow.
Why is nobody considering the exchange rate volatility here? Endless comments about saving a few pennies, while massive depreciation from holding large quantities in volatile crypto blow away any benefit of not using dollars.
Measures of volatility greatly impact perceived value of whatever it is you are holding/investing in. Don't try to make the claim to me that high volatility will have no effect on both sides of this market demanding BAT. That's silly talk.
If you want to try to tell me risk and volatility don't enter into decisions on which assets the market values, then you expose yourself as being as naive as I presume many buying into this idea are.
As I mentioned further up in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532097), BAT is an ERC-20 token and can be easily converted to a stablecoin, which is pegged to $1 USD per token. So if you can avoid that if you want to.
I'm aware of so-called stable coins. The risk with them is you must trust they have the backing & will make good on your claim. Now, since Brave is a company dealing with customers and content creators who actually have to get paid by them, they already must be trusted...so I do think this would have a been a better way to go.
I understand that crypto can be converted "easily". But how does that square with storing BAT in your wallet for long periods of time to frictionlessly use it to pay content-creators? Is "eaily converting" (presumably quickly with very small "hodl" periods) consistent with how the token is supposed to be used: stored on a wallet, collected by content creators periodically?
The short answer: for many Brave and BAT users are just going to do the standard thing of using the BAT they earn to support content creators. These folks aren’t concerned with volatility.
Users who are interested in building a business in the BAT ecosystem requires a different use case.
Now, if the BAT ecosystem takes off and it becomes possible to build a business using BAT, there will be all kinds of services to help content creators deal with the gobs of BAT they may collect.
Uphold, who is Brave’s partner that provides wallet services already has a bunch of useful services if someone has a non-trivial amount of BAT: https://uphold.com/
