I'm a big fan of the Brave browser.

It's a solid project, and it's good enough that I think Brendan Eich has atoned for the damage he did allowing Javascript to be unleashed on the world back in the day.

The idea of being directly rewarded to watch ads is potentially revolutionary, taking back control of what you share with advertisers is possibly a huge disruptive change. Arguably, this is how you change the internet. 

I do have some questions though.

Google is a company that sells ads

There's a thought experiment in AI circles. It's a cautionary tale on how seemingly good intent goes horribly wrong. They call it 'The Paperclip Maximizer'.

The TLDR of it : 

• we work at the paperclip company. There's a global paperclip shortage (I dunno why, maybe the paperclip harvest failed this year)
• Me and some other nerds build an AI with a simple goal. Optimize our paperclip supply.
• the AI decides if it was smarter, it would be able to get more paperclips
• (INEXPLICABLY, AT THIS POINT WE DO NOT BURN DOWN ITS SERVER FARM. presumably we've never read any sci-fi)
• with its newfound intelligence our friendly helpful AI makes enough money on the stock market to buy every paperclip factory on Earth
• to cover its supply issues, it also acquires mining rights for all minerals on earth
• at this point, it can either melt down human beings for the trace elements of metal in their bodies, or start to dismantle the solar system. It will make this decision purely on which is going to get more paperclips faster

Now, replace 'acquire paperclips' with 'sell ads', and every decision Google ever made makes total sense.

• why does GMail exist? Because having access to the text of mails users send lets the AIs target ads better. Better targeted ads means better click-through, which is appealing to ad buyers, which means we SELL MORE ADS. Happy algorithm.
• why does Android exist? Because at the time, Microsoft owned the mobile space, which was about to explode, and were not going to be keen to let Google anywhere near being a default browser or search option. Which would mean we SELL LESS ADS. Unthinkable. Launch an OS.
• why is Chrome a thing? Because Firefox wasn't taking enough market share from IE. And this was a good thing : it made browsing faster, it got content to people faster, but most importantly it made it more efficient to SELL MORE ADS.
• why is youtube full of toxic nutty conspiracy channels and hate speech? People like to share outrageous stuff, especially on Facebook (who are not letting google into the content-mining party they have going on otherwise). We should incentivize content producers to create as much sharable traffic as possible, because every click out to youtube from facebook is another chance to SELL MORE ADS. No problem here.
• why did they drop the 'don't be evil' part of the company mission statement? Because it was getting in the way of SELLING MORE ADS. Eyes on the prize.
• why did they kill Google Reader? No idea, but I'll bet you 10 DOGE it was something related to SELLING MORE ADS (no shut up, yes I know it's been six years, no i will not 'get over it')

For context, I pre-date Google. I remember an Internet that wasn't powered by clicks and likes and when fake internet points weren't the basis of a huge segment of the global economy, and brilliant MIT graduates weren't hunted for their ability to... well, you get the idea by now hopefully.

so what's the Brave projects motivation?

To be honest, the idea of somebody taking the Chromium open source codebase and using it to snip off some of Googles income is beautiful. 

Brave is about ownership of your clicks, privacy, the right to anonymity, of taking back the power. Right? I am prepared to believe that. It's long overdue. 

Before I get all kum-ba-ya about a project, I like to understand what their inner paperclip maximizer robot is telling them to do.

At at the fundamental level, what the Brave rewards robot wants is what the google robot wants, slightly tweaked: 

"replace their ads with our ads, and THEN SELL MORE ADS".

so I got questions

When a typical content creator puts ads on their site, they are making a deal with Google to be paid a percentage of the clicks. That no longer happens, because Brave users are no longer seeing those ads. Also bear in mind that Brave aren't specifically targeting Google ads. If I wanted to join a small collection of content creators who promoted each others sites, there's nothing to stop those ads being replaced by Brave as well.

Now obviously, there's still money being made, because advertisers are paying for these new ads too.

Google model

• site owner puts google ads on their site
• user clicks ad
• google get something, site owner gets a little. clicker gets nothing.

Brave model

• site owner puts google ads on site
• Brave user clicks a different ad (that may or may not pop up, either way they don't see the original ad)
• google gets nothing. site owner gets nothing. brave gets something, clicker gets a little.

Now I know you're going to say 'but the site owner does get something'. I disagree. They opted into Google ads. They didn't opt in to Brave rewards. They might not even know about Brave Rewards.

But when they do know about it, they can get paid right? Well, yeah. If they're ok with the KYC requirements of Uphold. Otherwise, no.

But the Brave users are getting paid, right? Well, yeah. And they opted in, at least. But they might not want to do KYC either (I certainly don't, to the point I'm not sure how I'm ever getting a payout).

There are some interesting questions wrt.

• who owns content
• how much that content should be manipulated by third parties between creator and viewer
• who should be able to decide when money changes hands

But those questions have nothing to do with the sale of paperclips, so I'm not wasting any thought on them.