Brave Software, the new ad-free browser, announced last week it released Brave for desktop and the beta of Brave Payments, its bitcoin-based micropayments system that lets users automatically and privately pay their favorite websites.
According to a blog post, Brave said, with Brave Payments, for the first time in the history of web browsers, consumers can now reward the websites whose content they value and want to support without anyone knowing about it, including Brave. With Brave Payments, there is no need for third parties, who often burden web pages with trackers, ads and, in some cases, malware.
“Users simply need to turn on Brave Payments from within Brave’s preferences page, then fund their Brave wallet (either with Coinbase or by using bitcoin they already have), and then browse as usual,” the company said in the blog post. “While everything is automatic, once enabled, the Brave Payments UI allows you to control which sites receive your support by manually enabling or disabling funding for any of the sites you visit.”
According to the company, users stay anonymous via the Anonize protocol over the network and via statistical voting on-device. Because of that, neither Brave Software nor any other entity can correlate browsing page visits with payments. Publishers collect their aggregated donations after authenticating themselves. All of the Brave Payments code is open-source.
“We’ve heard from many people who say that they are tired of the current ad-tech ecosystem that clogs their web pages and data connections with annoying ads and tracking pixels and scripts and that they would be happy to go ad-free if they could instead funnel their support directly to the websites they visit,” said the company. “Brave Payments now makes it possible for such users to try sending small payments to sites, at whatever aggregate support level they choose. Some will start with $5 a month, some more.”
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