The Brave Browser is a web browser that focuses on privacy and anonymity. Using brave, especially when using the duckduckgo search engine, does not allow any information to be extracted from your browsing habits to be sold to advertising companies and other pesky snoopers. Brave also blocks all forms of adverts from being shown and it does it in a way that in most cases it bypasses website adblock detection. Meaning that you can Browse websites which usually require you to allow adverts without actually seeing any. Combining this adblock feature, the lack of tracking and a very lightweight browser, you end up with a much faster browsing experience. From my testing it loads most websites about 35-40% faster. Brave is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and for both IOS and Android. Brave also has the feature to link all your Brave browser devices together so that you can carry on the same browsing session on another device when you leave your computer. While this is a feature that other browsers also have, brave goes about it in a much better way: There is no need to sign up or create an account, you simply go into options and generate a code to input on your other devices. This links all your devices without having to divulge any info about yourself.
In terms of the layout, everything that you would expect from a browser is present. You get the usual Search bar at the top and your bookmarks just below it. If you are coming from Google chrome or Firefox you should feel right at home here. When opening up the browser, unless you set a new homepage, you will be presented with a really good looking Brave dashboard:
As you can see you get some common pages saved on the right, some basic adbock stats on the left and some history, favorites and settings tabs on the bottom.
The adblock feature can be switched on and off with a simple toggle switch by clicking on the Brave logo
From here you can turn on or off features such as adblock, https anywhere, phishing protection and more. This window will also be where BAT tokens will be activated (more on that later in this post).
There are downsides to Brave too though, primarily the difficulty in adding extensions that are nothing but a simple click to install on chrome. I am told it is possible to migrate chrome extensions yourself if you are good at programming, however I am not sure how. This might or might not be a deal breaker for you. If the only extensions you currently use is adblock, then this is not an issue at all, however if you use a lot then it could be a problem. there are a variety of extensions on offer but not even close to the amount available for chrome. For me personally, it is a bit of a problem because i intend to use both the Wildspark extension and Reddcoin which will use an extension when Redd ID is released. You can submit extension requests on the Brave forums however they are very crowded with requests and could take a while to get to your request unless it is heavily upvoted. On the upside there are already a good amount of extensions including cryptocurrency related ones.
Well BAT (or the Basic Attention Token) is an ERC20 token that has the goal or reworking how advertisement is conducted in the future. In short, the Brave browser will pay you in BAT just for turning off adblock. Of course you are still free to turn adblock back on whenever you like, but of course you won't get any BAT while this is the case. You might be thinking that this seems to go against the ethos of the Brave browser, being that it is all about blocking ads and not gathering information about you, but it isn't and allow me to explain why. Brave will implement a system where your browser keeps track of your activity on your machine offline, meaning that you will receive targeted adverts without any of your information or data being displayed or broadcasted to either Brave or the advertisers. Advertisers will carry on paying to advertise as per usual, only this time YOU are getting paid instead of some corporation (I am looking at you Google). I recommend watching the official video to fully understand the platform.
Video taken from the BAT website, all credit goes to Brave!I think now is a good time to buy. The price is currently $0.16 and I would not be at all surprised if it hits $0.25 - $0.30. Looking at the charts we can see that it is currently recovering after taking a dip, although you could probably wait a little to get the best possible price. Just keep an eye on it and buy when you feel it has hit bottom. That said, the price is still pretty good now.
Looking at the roadmap, we have a lot of cool stuff to look forward to. This Screenshot is taken directly from the BAT website:
I must admit I am very excited about this one. The idea of actually MAKING money from advertisers instead of being milked by them makes me feel like we are finally taking a stand. From a moral perspective I cannot get behind this project enough, I really do like it. From a financial perspective I am less convinced, but still stand behind the concept. The problem I have with BAT is that the incentive to dump it as soon as you earn it will possibly outweigh the incentive to hold, meaning that unless the sheer volume of advertisers buying BAT is so big that it can handle this dump, I can't see there being long term mega growth. That said, I could very much be wrong and be pleasantly surprised. I think either way, the price of BAT will increase compared to what it is at the moment and will continue to but up small amounts of it.
Happy Investing
Cryptoviking
