Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
This is flat out incorrect. Brave as a company can easily consolidate payments such that fees are minimal.
How do you tip $.0035 for a tweet?
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.
Saying I earned 0.00045 BAT is fun, but doesn’t actually help me with anything until I convert it to dollars anyway.
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:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
How about if you're a content creator who got paid in these ever-volatile digital currency units...instead of dollars? If those same creators instantly traded out for $, what was their trading fees? Is all of this something to consider when singing the praises of saving a few pennies on transaction costs?
> saving a few pennies on transaction costs
The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.
As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?
The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.
This is just pushing the problem one step removed.
Is it not only relevant what you trade for your groceries?
If you can find someone to take BAT for that, in stable exchange rates, then your point stands.
If you have to acquire $ then what the exchange rate is for $ to BAT comes back into relevance.
Again, perpetually trading BAT back and forth for showing ads/watching ads is restating my premise about holding BAT.
Whether people will be willing to do so greatly depends on exchange rates and volatility.
I would much prefer to just give brave my CC details, regardless of what internal currency they’re using for rewarding content.
Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also the service time. Most service won't let you take it out until your cash reach an high limit. With a concurrency, at worse you can keep using it in other alternative ways (at a bare minimum, on your web browsing in this case).
Just look at BAT price volatility and decline over last year.
Give me real money every day, I'm happy to pay a small fee in order to not have to deal with the hive of scum and villainy that is the cryptocurrency market.
