<br>
Micropayments for content monetisation as well as those built into Web 3.0 to replace advertising, is what really intrigued me about the capabilities of cryptocurrencies in the first place. I'd been researching what others were saying about micropayments built into browsers in order to pay the publisher of the page for the view when I came across the Brave Browser, although the token aspect of it was still in the works, they promised to natively block ads and trackers as a feature of the browser itself. [You can try the browser here](https://brave.com/downloads.html)

The idea that we could do away with annoying popup ads became a reality when popup blockers were developed not long after the popups themselves arrived. Now we have little trackers following us around everywhere we go online, displaying ads based on our viewing habits. Then came the tracker disablers like Privacy Badger, and the other ad blockers like uBlock Origin.
 
It's almost like we don't want to be advertised to. Not all the time, anyway.
 
### Is there a better way?
 
One team suggests that they have found a solution, and the solution is a BAT.

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https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/03/20/13/46/bat-1268650_960_720.jpg

Not that kind of bat…
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*Basic Attention Token*, or BAT, is a token created by the team of Brave browser. At the head of this team is Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and Co-Founder of Mozilla.
 

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https://brave.com/assets/img/press/brave_icon_shadow_300px.png
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>The company's co-founder is Brian Bondy, who worked on Firefox and Khan Academy. The company's employees include Marshall Rose, a network protocol engineer, and Yan Zhu, who worked on SecureDrop and Tor.
[(wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Brave_Software)
 
 
>Brave aims to transform the online ad ecosystem with micropayments and a new revenue-sharing solution to give users and publishers a better deal, where fast, safe browsing is the path to a brighter future for the open web.
[(Source)](https://brave.com/about.html)
 
 
The Crowd Sale for Basic Attention Tokens raised something like $35,000,000 USD within about 30 seconds!  I was not one of those but I picked some up after the sale at a price around 15 cents each and have been buying a bit here and there since then.
 
We’ve been told that ["Digital Advertising is broken"](https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/index.html), and that Basic Attention Tokens [“aim to disrupt that broken system.”](https://www.ethnews.com/basic-attention-tokens-aim-to-disrupt-digital-advertising)
 
Basic Attention Tokens may be the way forward, or maybe they won’t.
 
I’ll definitely be watching this space to see what happens.
 
 
 
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<sup>Don’t take financial advice from some guy on the net. I’m not recommending that you purchase these tokens, you need to really look into it for yourself. I have a significant (to me) investment in BATs.</sup>
 

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