“Brave” launches bitcoin micropayments

Recently founded start-up bitcoin-based browser Brave already drew the attention of the media with raising a huge funding from leading venture capital firms and angel investors. “Brave” team claims browser to be more user-friendly in terms of safety, privacy and, the issue they mostly focus on, advertising.

So what’s the groundbreaking idea this team came up with? The browser is going to allow only brave-approved ads, which means you don’t have to look at disturbing banners anymore, just some soft-core tiny blurbs. Why not ban all the ads? Brave explains:

“The web has become a different place. With the ad-tech ecosystem out of control, users have revolted and blocking ads has become the new weapon of choice for improving their browsing speed, safety and privacy. Unfortunately, blocking alone results in a race to the bottom where nobody wins. Without the ability for content creators to earn money for their efforts, users could be left with fewer sites to browse, relegated to hand-picked content from controlled sources.”

This approach has only one flaw: without the annoying ads, content creators lose the ability to earn money. In order to solve this problem, micropayments were introduced:

“As part of our 0.11.6 release of Brave for desktop today, we are pleased to announce the beta version of Brave Payments, our Bitcoin-based micropayments system that can automatically and privately pay your favorite websites.”

Safety is also taken care of:

“For the first time in the history of web browsers, people can now seamlessly reward the sites whose content they value and wish to support, while remaining untracked by anyone, including us at Brave Software, Inc.”

To show how exactly the new system works, Brave made this infographic: