I am confused and haven’t found an answer by browsing the suggested posts. I have checked “autocontribute” to the sites I visit but nothing seems to go to them. I have used this now for the month of May and have a message that says “awards will be delivered in 7 days”. Delivered where? They were in my browser, now they are gone, and then they will be “delivered” back? And why was this money not distributed to the sites I used like the settings say? I don’t want to collect the BAT but want to see how they are distributed to the sites I frequent. Thanks.
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Hey there Bravo. Rather than me copy/paste everything, I’d highly recommend you check out my FAQ at -Retired- PSA: User FAQ - Support & Answers
It does advise a lot of how all of that works. In the meanwhile, short version is BAT weren’t in your browser but an estimate of your earnings were. Estimated earnings get zeroed out and sent into real earnings. If you’re unverified, it gets delivered to your browser where you have to Claim them and it stores there If you’re with Uphold or Gemini, they end up getting sent to your Gemini or Uphold account.
If you have sent tips or had “Auto-Contribute” turned on, it should reduce that from your earnings. Then you’ll receive anything left from those earnings once those deductions are taken out. If that doesn’t happen, it means something in your settings may have been turned off or you didn’t add the specific places.
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Just to clarify, when Auto-Contribute gets turned on, you get access to Auto-Contribute Settings. With that, you get to choose the payment amount to be divided amongst everything. So in this screenshot, 1 BAT would be taken out of my earnings and divided. But you can increase that. You can tweak other settings as well.
Then under that, there’s Tips. Tips can be done as a 1-time basis or when you go to tip, you can establish a repeating monthly tip. To learn more about that, check out https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021123971-How-do-I-tip-websites-and-Content-Creators-in-Brave-Rewards-
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Thanks for your reply. I find the whole “getting verified” thing highly distasteful and will probably never do it. Crypto is supposed to be money without permission. For BAT to get popular, that part will have to go. So for now, I am only interested in BAT as a philosophy, and new and interesting way to compensate the content that I like. Instead of getting rid of ads, now I am ok with them due to the BAT concept. Who would have imagined? So I guess I will just wait to see what is paid to sites, and what is returned back to me.
Keep in mind that isn’t a Brave policy. Governments throughout the world are requiring exchanges and all to report to them. This is why KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) has been put into place and you have Uphold, Gemini, and others require you to provide so much of your personal information. If you haven’t heard of it, you might want to check out articles like https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/what-is-aml-and-kyc-for-crypto/
So anything that can be turned into cash by users, governments mandate that you prove your identity and they can track how much money you are getting. Not only under the guise of fighting crime, but also because they want to tax you for it. Once government steps in and laws are in place, there’s not much than can be done.
That said, Brave is doing their part in avoiding. So right now the reason you can earn BAT without having to provide all of your information to them is because they aren’t allowing you to directly convert it to cash. BAT is basically Frequent Flyer Miles or Customer Reward point. Currently those points are used to Tip creators to encourage them to limit ads and work with Brave so you can have a smoother browsing experience, but also just so they can keep their content going. Eventually they are looking to have things like Pay With Brave which will allow you to pay for subscriptions or special access to content by Creators. All of which would not require you to go through KYC/AML to my knowledge.
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I know very well how the crypto world works. KYC is when you want to interact with fiat as the govs control that. I can’t think of a crypto that requires kyc to use (personally) outside of the fiat/exchange system. As far as I can see, BAT is received in the browser and given (in BAT) to creators. There is no contact with fiat, nor any exchange, so I don’t see the need for third party wallets, kyc, etc. If I was getting paid btc or eth for watching ads, I could receive that directly to my private wallet. Why the creepy third parties for BAT?
You say: “So anything that can be turned into cash by users, governments mandate that you prove your identity and they can track how much money you are getting”
That is not true. I hold several different cryptos and can send and receive freely without reporting to anyone. I can also exchange between cryptos without verification. I need to get verified only to exchange to fiat.
The tokens sent to the creators go to their verified wallet (exchange with KYC), so in the end who will takes need an identification anyway for use them.
That’s where you’re slightly off. We don’t get BAT in the browser. We get vBAT but it calls it BAT. You can’t take or use it for anything except tipping. That’s why I keep making the comparison to things like Reward Points or Frequent Flyer Miles. They are not a currency or anything at all. It doesn’t become BAT until it gets to an exchange, such as Uphold or Gemini.
This is only true if Unverified Wallet. If Unverified, you can’t send or receive BAT. It just sits there as points to be awarded and later converted to advertisers and content creators.
Remember, if you can mine something or obtain, you can keep. Just like BAT that’s out on the market can be sent or received by people. You can put it in cold storage and send to others. It can even be kept in places like Brave Wallet. The issue is going from the browser to out and about. For example:
BAT Rewards come in the form of virtual BAT (vBAT) until you verify with an exchange. When you verify with an exchange, your vBAT gets deposited there and converted to real BAT. The step for going to an exchange is required for AML/KYC reasons. We’re looking at the decentralization process for Brave ads rewards as part of Themis
Brave Wallet is a self custody wallet and therefore we cannot currently pay to it for the user rev-share for ads. We would need to KYC/AML your address and may also need a money transmitter license to do so.
For tipping, we are planning to implement on-chain P2P tipping. There are some things to work through including high Ethereum gas fees and no anonymity on Ethereum. After we have Solana support we will likely add this pretty quickly.
And when I have had discussions with people like Brendan Eich, he’s advised they are limited. In one of his Twitter messages regarding things like Themis and suggesting it would let people not worry about KYC/AML or sanctions, he advised:
Themis => decentralized ad buyer performance verification. Doesn’t help with compliance, nothing does. LN doesn’t help, nodes must be licensed MSBs or MTLs which means they will have to KYC for AML and sanctions
The idea is they are stressing that they are stuck in a regulatory bubble and are limited. I’m not going to pretend to know enough for the specifics. I’m guessing since it’s all being used as part of a big business plan and isn’t just an independent crypto like many other types of tokens or coins tend to be, there’s more to it. All I can do is relay what I’ve been told according to people who work for Brave and bits that others Users who are proficient on all things crypto have advised.
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Thanks for your detailed explanation. What I conclude is that BAT is not a decentralized, permissionless token as are most other cryptos. It is a centralized, corporate token and therefore hostage to regulation. I see that they want to move in a decentralizing direction which will greatly help the value of their token as it will never achieve any real value in this format. There are already many platforms with tipping and paying features that are fully decentralized (but no browsers yet). I like brave browser and the BAT concept. I hope they will work out a way to fully decentralize the token and bring some value to it.
@bravoguy I like your point of view. First,
You may already know- Rewards panel shows 2 balances, Your balance shows BAT that you own & Estimated earnings show what you will be paid in next payout cycle that begins on 8th each month. When new month begins, Estimated earnings reset and instead you see a banner You X BAT rewards will arrive in Y days on new tab page widget, on brave://rewards/ and on clicking BAT triangle on right side of URL bar.
If you owned some BAT (shown in Your balance), you can see you auto-contributions on brave://rewards-internals/ > Contributions. Next auto-contribute date is 18th June so you may have to wait until that to see how your BATs were contributed.
Now, you will like my point of view too-
I wouldn’t put it that way. The BAT that exists on the block-chain is not centralised and can be acquired/transacted outside of Brave’s ecosystem without KYC. You can see here that the shareholders of BAT are mostly large exchanges and Brave could be one of its minority holders- https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb6250d2887ef#balances
The vBAT that Saoiray mentioned, exists on Brave’s internal ledger, has limited usage and can be said to be centralised. Brave largely controls who gets to own them. But it’s not hostage to regulation as you don’t need KYC to get it.
And I think if there is a way to move this BAT from internal ledger to a self-custody wallet, you would still not require a KYC as no fiat gets involved. But would be difficult to implemet especially considering Gas fee that wouldn’t leave much of the value of monthly earned BAT, for transfer. Bridging internal ledger to Ethereum network would also be another challenge.
So just for exhanging BAT or vBAT for fiat would require KYC/AML adoption.
That said, Brave’s one of the masterpiece Themis- 1 & 2 are in the works. And with Solana integration, providing fast & low fee transactions, Brave might become able to process Ads on-chain using Themis. Then getting Solana-pegged BAT directly in our self-custody wallets wouldn’t be a distant dream.
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Thanks for your clarification. I like what Brave is trying to do and am rooting for them. Hopefully human greed will not derail the project somewhere along the line. Only time will tell, but they seem to be on the right track so far.
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