> But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support
This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
Brave's internal ledger for micro-payments can measure dollars to however many decimal places they wish. Sure, when you actually transfer money out of the system there will have to be some rounding, but those transfers are minimal as Brave can batch them.
You only need one transfer for each user and one transfer for each content producer. You don't need and/or want the O(n^2) cross product transfers.
The point is it’s not possible to send such small quantities with fiat currencies. If something becomes popular, those small contributions add up.
BAT can also be used for paywalls, VPN payments, pay-per-view streaming and other smallish transactions. As the BAT ecosystem grows, there will be more incentive to transact in BAT, so there’s not so much of a need to convert to fiat.
BTW, BAT is up nearly 8% as I write this, presumably on the news of the Brave 1.0 release. There’s a decent chance that BAT is worth significantly more 2 or 3 years now; we’re still in the early days.
Finally, because BAT uses the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard, it automatically interoperates with the Ethereum ecosystem, including being able to be converted to other ERC-20 tokens, including stablecoins like PAX and GUSD, which are designed to always be valued at $1 per share, kinda like a money market fund.
They don't currently integrate with a payment provider, and if they did they'd have to deal with that provider shutting off payments due to pressure from governments looking to censor content. They'd also have to generate income tax documents in a wide variety of jurisdictions.
Doing the kind of business worldwide where you pay people in fiat (rather than just get paid) is a tremendous undertaking. Even Google hasn't managed to pull it off worldwide just yet:
This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.