So if you're already on Publish0x, then you're probably already familiar with the Brave browser, and the benefits of the whole tipping system using BAT (Basic Attention Tokens) and how essentially you get paid to look at ads. Now ideally, the system is absolutely fantastic. Not only are you using what feels to be a secure browser, but it adds the whole webby-3 feel of you taking ownership of your own data and how that data is being harnessed. From what I read on other blogs and reddit, people can easily get paid out 20-or-so BAT a month, so roughly 25-30 dollars for using their browser as they normally would. Not something to send the kids to college with, but free money sounds fantastic right?
Well I finally bit the bullet a while back and decided to sign-up myself. I connected my Gemini account (use my referral if you don't have one yet https://www.gemini.com/share/mlv6qw37) pretty seamlessly, and then immediately I started to receive pop-up ad notices in the bottom right hand corner with different advertisements--Yubikey, Cake Defi, Jade Protocol. And like clockwork, your BAT starts getting tallied up in your expected earnings:
The ads that you click on vary in how much BAT they accrue, I believe everything from around .001 to .01. If you don't have a Gemini account, then you can also use an Uphold account, but I don't recommend that you do so , because with the high withdrawal requirements it's a lot pricier to withdraw your BAT. BAT gets accrued monthly and the paid out around the 7th of the following month, so on December 7th last week, I was supposed to get paid out for my earnings in November.
Now as you can see in my balance readout above, my balance is....Zero. Even between December 1st and 6th, I got a notice in my wallet window that I should be expecting to get X amount of BAT by then. But as December 7th came and went, it's now December 13th, and still no payout.
This leads me to yesterday, which led me to go into the dreaded world of Brave browser support. I wrote a specific question geared towards my specific problem: "Why did nothing post when I got a notice saying that I would? and with an added note that I had my wallet verified as soon as I installed the browser.
What struck me the most were the tons of complaints from others about problems they were having with the Brave Mobile app, the Brave Wallet (yes they have their own native custodial wallet built into the browser), and also not getting paid out for either content creating or tipping. Man were there a lot of issues, not only with the brave browser itself, but apparently there's multiple versions of the Brave mobile app out there with different functionalities with or without the Brave app. I believe the two main ones have different icons, one in blue and one in their regular orange, and one will pull up a screen with the Brave wallet, the other will not. Also, to make things even more confusing, it's not clear as to whether or not the Brave wallet is auto-setup. There were tons of people (myself included) that never setup a Brave wallet, but now cannot do so even if they wanted without resetting the whole system.
Hitting 'Enter,' not expecting an immediate response, I turned down my computer and went to bed.
Next morning, I see that there were several other people than me that were upvoting my issue saying that they had the same problem, albeit some in different languages and in perhaps a not-as-nice tone. Eventually a tech rep did get back to me asking for specifics of my problem, so hopefully now they're "looking into it."
So look, am I trying to deter people from using Brave? No, not at all. In fact, just like publish0x, it's a beautiful idea and gives more power to the people. Do they still need to get some of their stuff figured out? Absolutely. At the very least, I think people need to support the idea, support the movement, because this is all of what web3 should be about anyway right?
