What if Amazon didn’t accept BAT as a form of payment?
Readers please beware that the ideas in this post are quite ‘raw’. I really just wanted to write it and post it while the ideas were fresh in my mind.
About Brave browser and BAT
There’s no guarantee that everyone reading this post will know what Brave browser or BAT are so the short explanation is that Brave is an open-source browser that has its own native cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Token (BAT). Brave browser’s main selling points are: it blocks ads; it is much more privacy-friendly than other main-stream browsers. Users of the browser can opt-in to receive notifications to view ads. In return for viewing ads they are rewarded with BAT tokens. Anyone can apply as a registered Brave content creator and users can ‘tip’ said content creators with BAT tokens. Alternatively one can just withdraw their BAT tokens from their wallet and exchange them for other crypto assets. My understanding is that this is currently a difficult and expensive process but I’m led to believe that it will be easier and cheaper in future. Advertisers also pay with BAT. Thus, the idea is that the incentives of content consumers, content creators and advertisers are all aligned - hence the triangle in the BAT logo.
Previously ...
A few months ago I wrote a post titled ‘What if Amazon accepted BAT as a form of payment?’. The gist was that it was in Amazon’s interest to accept BAT because it would attract more people to the Brave browser. This would take market share away from Chrome (a Google product), which is good for Amazon. Amazon could advertise on Brave, which would draw users from Brave into their ecosystem, and items could be paid for with BAT tokens. This would add utility to the BAT token. As proponents of BAT argue, Brave could easily be forked such that the native token had more utility (like DAI or ETH).
Now ...
But what if Amazon didn’t accept BAT as a form of payment? Brave rewards was recently rolled out in Australia and now I earn rewards. This is super-exciting and it got me thinking more about Brave and BAT (also thinking about a recent post by steem user @jk6276 about making money while reading). I even went to the trouble of registering as a content creator - I created Twitter, Reddit and YouTube channels.
Here’s an alternative which might work that would allow Brave browser users to natively pay for items on Amazon with BAT.
As far as I know, Brave didn’t form any sort of alliance or partnership with these social channels. Instead, because Brave is the browser it can ‘inject’ buttons into the UI of these social apps, which enables users to natively tip content creators without Twitter, Reddit or YouTube needing to care. This thinking led me back to the Amazon idea. Brave could insert a ‘Pay with BAT’ button and via some sort of POST inject the payment. I believe this is possible because another company is already doing it. The one downside I see here is that, without a partnership with Amazon, under the hood the BAT tokens would need to be converted into fiat and paid for with a centralised credit card.
Aligning incentives
I propose that users who pay for items with BAT pay a premium for the privilege (say 5% extra). This could be broken up as follows:
- one third could go to users who ‘stake’ BAT tokens
- one third could go to Brave to cover conversion costs and be re-invested
- one third could go to either: the content creators that the purchaser has nominated to auto-tip, or be dispersed to all content creators registered on Brave (the purchaser decides on which of these two)
These numbers are just arbitrary to demonstrate an example.
Why would Brave want to do this?
Simple - they would take a cut. Brave could also replicate this functionality for other e-commerce sites with the same incentive model. So even without a partnership with Amazon or anyone else, this would add to the utility of the BAT token. This would surely create more value for holders of the token.
EDIT: if Brave is open-source, then this functionality would port across to a forked version with a different native token so the utility argument probably doesn’t stack up. Sigh.
Why would users want to do this?
Convenience. At present, to get any financial value from the BAT tokens they’ve earned, users send the tokens somewhere they can exchange for BTC, then sell that for fiat via the on/off-ramp provider that links to their bank account. People pay premiums for convenience. Also, BAT token holders can take a cut if they stake their tokens.
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