BAT: Great idea but I don't think token will be worth much

After reading through the BAT whitepaper I think the system is a great idea, the company will do well, the tokens will be great for users but they won't be worth much.

Bat, like Amps is hoping to become the currency of the new attention economy.

It's a great idea. By cutting out middlemen, and complexity they can create a more simple system where advertisers pay sites and users for the attention they generate (sites) and give (users). Best of all it speeds up browsing and keeps our info cryptographically safe.

However I don't think the tokens will rise in value long term.

This is similar to the file storage tokens. Users get paid (in bat) for something they are giving away for free today, attention. For a long time paying anything at all for attention will be sufficient to get people on the network. It's not till everyone is on that bat prices might start to rise. BAT will need to slay every other model and get 50 percent of ad spend before the price of bats really goes up. Look how long it has taken Facebook and Google ad prices to go up. The first step is about getting the product more widely used. Otherwise the price is likely to flop.

It's similar to paying people to use their spare hard drive.

If a resource like a hard drive (or attention) is sitting there unused, it's not till the spare capacity is used up that prices can meaningfully rise. Otherwise it will simply attract more people to supply hard drives. In this case more people will download Brave and keep bat prices low for a long time.

All this said I really hope it succeeds.

It's a much more direct way to give all stakeholders what they want. Just don't expect the bat token to be worth much for a long time.