The Brave browser is an interesting relatively new project for an open-source web-browser being developed with user’s privacy, security and performance in mind as well as with some interesting ideas to actually award users of the browser as well as allowing users to support their favorite websites without having to watch annoying ads on them. We like the idea, especially considering that the rewards part is also based on Bitcoin for the payments, so Brave is also supporting crypto currencies. A couple of months ago we have tried the browser in an earlier stage and there were still a lot of things that needed work, so we gave it another try with the most recent version. We already tried the ad and tracking blocking functionality and it has worked well even before, but this time the focus was a more recent feature that is still in beta – the Brave Payments feature. If enabled (off by default) it allows users to donate Bitcoins to their favorite websites where they do spend a lot of time and enjoy the content they find. As already mentioned this is powered by BTC transactions, so you need to actually have some Bitcoins and be willing to donate them…
If you want to try the Brave Payments beta feature you need to open up the Brave browser’s settings and go to the Payments tab, where you will find an off-on switch that would allow you to enable the feature. The basic control panel here allows you to select a monthly budget from a dropdown menu (5 USD to 20 USD) and see what amount in USD you currently have (deposited in Bitcoin). Once you enable the feature you will get a Bitcoin wallet address generated for you where you can deposit BTC that will be used to support your favorite websites.
There are multiple ways to obtain Bitcoins available, but after you have a hold of some you need to send them to the BTC wallet address you get shown when you click on the Add funds button in the Brave Payments window. Bitcoin transactions do require 1 confirmation on the network before the USD balance becomes available in your account.
When you start using the Brave browser you will see a list of websites ranked by the time you spent on them, in this list you can choose which sites you want to support using the Include switch (it is ON by default, though it should probably be OFF for new ones). The monthly budget you set, provided that you have available balance in your Brave BTC wallet is going to be distributed each month to all of the websites you decide to support, getting split according to a percentages based on a combination of how many pages you visit and how much time you spend on each site. Payments from users to website publishers are being made once a month.
Site owners that want to be able to receive funds from users supporting them through the Brave browser will need to verify themselves. According to the information available that will happen once there are at least $10 USD in BTC available for them from users with confirmation/registration emails being sent to the domain owners and the webmaster of the website. We are yet to go through that procedure to see how it goes, but the rest we have tried does seem to work pretty well already.
The Advanced Settings menu allows you to do some important things such as the minimum page time before logging a visit as well as the minimum visits fro publisher relevancy. You will most likely want to increase these values from their default lows in order to filter out random websites that you visit just once for example. The other very important functionality in this menu is the ability for backing up and recovering your Brave BTC wallet, this is something that you would want to make sure you backup just in case as you will be holding some amount of BTC in it if you will be using the Brave Payments feature.
For the moment the only way to take advantage of the Brave Payments beta feature is if you deposit some coins in your Brave wallet, but in the future the Brave browser will allow you to also earn while suing the browser if you want to. The standard functionality of the Brave browser is to block ads, but it can also replace them with Brave ads and for seeing these both website publishers and users might also have an additional stream of income. Above is the table with the percentage share for profit that will be coming from replaced ads, 55% go to the publishers and 15% go to the people that actually see the ads using the Brave browser. For the moment however there are still no replacement ads available apparently, but in the near future we may actually see that functionality becoming available in beta as well, just like the Brave Payments feature now.
– For more information and to try out the Brave browser and the Brave Payments feature…
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