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.

Does anyone care if they don’t get paid until they earn a full dollar?

Saying I earned 0.00045 BAT is fun, but doesn’t actually help me with anything until I convert it to dollars anyway.

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.