Brave to offer publishers, users, and advertisers a cut of the profits with bitcoin

Brave, a new open source internet browser, was made to compete with the likes of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, but does away with the existing advertising economy, replacing it with a new one that works quite differently, running on Bitcoin.

“The new Brave browser blocks all the greed and ugliness on the Web that slows you down and invades your privacy. Then we put clean ads back, to fund website owners and Brave users alike. Users can spend their funds to go ad-free on their favorite sites.“

– Brave Software

Brave co-founder, Brendan Eich, wrote JavaScript for the Netscape Navigator Web browser in April 1995, while working at Netscape Communications. He went on to co-found the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation, serving as the chief technical officer and CEO. He currently serves as Brave Softwares CEO and president.

Eich founded Brave with the projects current lead developer, Brian Bondy, who worked on Mozilla’s Firefox browser from 2011 to 2014, and then at Khan Academy until May 2015. Along with the rest of their team, Eich and Bondy see this project as nothing short of a mission “to save the web.”

A developer’s version of Brave was unveiled on Wednesday, along with the open source code and a roadmap. It has several features that sound game-changing for internet browsing, including greatly reduced page loading speeds and an integrated bitcoin wallet from BitGo.

The Brave browser initially removes all forms of advertising from a webpage, including banners, pop-ups, tracking pixels, malware, flash cookies. "Brave browsers block everything,” Eich says on the company’s website, including  various types of ad tracking, “initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising ‘dirty pipe,’ impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals."

Using the ad-targeting service Sonobi, the browser then serves different ads in some locations. “We block trackers, that’s a big win compared to the status quo. We also block eyesore ads that won’t be replaced (think of those parasite pictures in image grids at the bottom of pages),” states the Brave site.

“We currently replace only certain standard-sized ads, and we aim for higher quality than what would have been served in those spaces. So we reduce the total number of ads experienced by the user and increase the quality and relevance, while simultaneously blocking trackers that follow your activity across sites.“

• Brave Software

All in all, this process is said to save massive amounts of loading time on each page, up to 60% according to Brave. However, it isn’t clear how much faster Brave will be in practice, as the new ads are still downloaded.

There may be some speed saving to be had by restricting the information collected from the browser. While the browser has all of your private data, needed to analyze user intent for targeted ads, the open source code protects this data on the client device. “Our server side has no access to this data in the clear, nor does it have decryption keys,” states Brave.

By keeping all of the user data in the browser itself, and never sending it to third parties, both privacy and security are taken to new places no browser has ever attempted before.

“We provide signals to the browser to help it make good decisions about what preferences and intent signals to expose to maximize user, publisher and advertiser value. Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user’s preferences and intent signals to prevent ‘fingerprinting’ the user by a possibly unique set of tags.”

• Brave Software

While blocking current advertising may sound like a drain on revenue for most websites, PageFair estimates that ad-blocking software already cost publishers nearly US$22 billion during 2015, with the number of active adblock users having grown 41% globally in the previous 12 months.

Brave offers webmasters a new revenue stream that could be more profitable. Eich told Media Post that ad revenue will be automatically split four ways; 15 percent each will be distributed to the user, Sonobi, and Brave, with 55 percent going to publishers. There is, however, no word yet on how Brave plans to stop the problem of click fraud.

The company is still working out the payment system details, which include an open source project on Github. But the concept, according to Eich, is that users and publishers will be paid in Bitcoin.

“We intend to let expert users ‘bring their own BTC’ to self-fund their wallets and auto-micropay for as much of their browsing as they like.”

• Brave Software

Bitcoin’s price volatility is another issue being worked on, but the Brave developers appear to have a plan to smooth out volatility, at least for their users. “We hope to keep funds in BTC only in monthly payment buffers,” the website says.

Partnering with BitGo gives Brave the added option of using the wallet’s identity service, giving users an easy way to cryptographically prove their identity online. This might give Brave a super-simple way to remove all login prompts from the web, and be more secure than before.

Another rumored option for the browser is that the user will be able to remove ads entirely, with a small bitcoin micropayment. Ultimately, the ways Brave will end up using Bitcoin payments all come down to which experiments have positive outcomes. With Bitcoin as a payment layer for the whole internet, effortlessly woven into any and every page, Brave could do far more than rapidly increase bitcoin adoption; It could make the web more likely than ever to fulfil promises made back in the early 1990’s.