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Abstract

href="https://readmedium.com/i-like-the-principles-behind-brave-browser-but-the-surf-to-earn-leitmotif-is-pure-deception-c5f0caf05755"> this article</a> for a discussion on Brave’s payments system.I’ve been using Brave for almost a year now in my personal smartphone and laptop. No regrets!Leaving aside <a href="https://readmedium.com/i-like-the-principles-behind-brave-browser-but-the-surf-to-earn-leitmotif-is-pure-deception-c5f0caf05755">my complaints about its rewards for viewing ads</a>, I love Brave more and more each day because of these reasons:<ul><li>It is the materialization of a great series of principles that I agree with.</li><li>It drove me into the world of cryptocurrencies deeper than any other reading, website, or app. The browser itself, its documentation and the forums around it are quite rich in jargon, which is bad for your immediate understanding but forces you to do the research. So… you end up learning! I’m now even <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/obtain-unlimited-historical-crypto-data-through-simple-api-calls-without-keys-8a6f5ed55b43">writing programs about cryptocurrencies</a>! and people keep asking for <a href="https://readmedium.com/an-unexpected-outcome-of-writing-here-readers-offering-small-side-hustles-17f5cda9c620">personalized programs to view crypto stuff</a>.</li><li>As I revolve around in the title of this article, Brave changed my relationship with YouTube, to a level that I now cannot watch any videos in its app or in its website on a regular browser. I now exclusively watch YouTube videos through the Brave browser. Because I got it with the ads!</li></ul><h2 id="2872">Almost one year of Brave on my smartphone and on my laptop</h2>This is what Brave looks like in my smartphone, here watching one of my favorite YouTube channels:<figure id="59d0"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*_GhG5lk1MnEqkCDHyTws4A.png"><figcaption></figcaption></figure>So yes, like a normal browser. But with the twist -whole point of this story- that when I’m on Youtube on Brave I see no ads, even if logged in with my account. Neither at the beginning of the video nor while it’s playing.<h2 id="dab5">You’ll love this other feature</h2>Another great feature of Brave for smartphones is that the video keeps playing when you change screen or app to do something else -something that doesn’t happen with Chrome, on my phone at least. This means I can keep enjoying music while doing other stuff, or even view videos on the side as I do any other thing!For example, here I’m going through old photos while I keep listening to the video

Options

and even see it in the small rectangle (yes, you can move the video around):<figure id="e2bf"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*7-mZQIhezbhV-S9yXEsktg.png"><figcaption></figcaption></figure><h1 id="6c04">Curious about rewards?</h1>In exactly 10 months of Brave, I’ve made 10.25 BAT on my smartphone and 1.5 BAT on my laptop (not a typo, just 1.5).<figure id="0da6"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*WUy67rYmK_vtadTnveQB5w.png"><figcaption></figcaption></figure>This is lame, yes I know (notice though that from what I’ve read around you might get more BAT, or less, in other countries). And even worse if you consider that the BAT has barely passed the 1 USD exchange rate a couple of times ever since it exists. The usual exchange rate for BAT has been so far under 1 USD, and it’s right now (February 12th, 2022) around 0.9 USD. So right now I’ve obtained something like around 10 USD from a year of browsing.If you are curious to know more about this, look at this screenshot from a web app I’m preparing based on web code like <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/obtaining-historical-and-real-time-crypto-data-with-very-simple-web-programming-7b481f153630">this</a> and <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/obtain-unlimited-historical-crypto-data-through-simple-api-calls-without-keys-8a6f5ed55b43">this</a>. On the top you have the price evolution of the BAT, and on the bottom that of Bitcoin for comparison (yes, they are very correlated, here Pearson’s r is 0.878):<figure id="7db4"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*SQWKiB2Z-_OXdObjGzAo1A.png"><figcaption></figcaption></figure><h1 id="7444">Want to give Brave a try?</h1>Get Brave for free at <a href="https://brave.com/download/">https://brave.com/download/</a>And let me know how you liked it!<a href="https://www.lucianoabriata.com/">www.lucianoabriata.com</a> I write and photoshoot about everything that lies in my broad sphere of interests: nature, science, technology, programming, etc. <a href="https://lucianosphere.medium.com/membership">Become a Medium member</a> to access all its stories (affiliate links of the platform for which I get small revenues without cost to you) and <a href="https://lucianosphere.medium.com/subscribe">subscribe to get my new stories</a> by email. To consult about small jobs check my <a href="https://lucianoabriata.altervista.org/services/index.html">services page here</a>. You can <a href="https://lucianoabriata.altervista.org/office/contact.html">contact me here</a>.</article></body>

Thanks, Brave browser -I was sick of YouTube’s ads

With Brave I enjoy watching videos without ads, even as I chat or do something else on the phone, I can listen to music from outside the browser, and even get some BAT pennies for all that.

YouTube is becoming increasingly annoying to watch, with more and longer ads, many of which I cannot even skip. They just lack the Skip button. But as I show you here, there is a solution: using the Brave web browser (no, I don’t work for them).

The worst thing with YouTube is that most of its ads are of no interest to me, so they don’t even fulfill their purpose of making me want to purchase something. In fact, if I were the company paying for these ads, I would stop advertising on YouTube right now and would only consider joining again when it shows me that it has improved its ad recommendations.

I’m totally puzzled by the fact that Google’s Deepmind can do crazy-difficult things like folding proteins or quantum calculations but Google’s YouTube cannot realize what kinds of things I like!! And come on, I’m very easy… just show me bikes, Lego things, plants, drums or guitars, or some of the other things I search on Google every day, and I will click. I don’t buy that there’s no exchange of user data between the various Google services…

By the way, all this reminds me that YouTube cannot even correctly concatenate episodes one after the other… So much for AI.

Now let’s go to Brave and how it blocks YouTube ads.

Fortunately, YouTube ads are a pain only on a few devices where I cannot run Brave

But not in my main smartphone and laptop, where I use this wonderful browser.

What is Brave?

Brave is a free, privacy-oriented, ad-blocking browser focused on keeping your web surfing private by automatically blocking advertisements and trackers. It in turn gives you the option to watch ads, for which it rewards you with a cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Token (BAT). You can contribute the collected BATs to websites and content creators, or download them to your own wallet -check however this article for a discussion on Brave’s payments system.

I’ve been using Brave for almost a year now in my personal smartphone and laptop. No regrets!

Leaving aside my complaints about its rewards for viewing ads, I love Brave more and more each day because of these reasons:

It is the materialization of a great series of principles that I agree with.
It drove me into the world of cryptocurrencies deeper than any other reading, website, or app. The browser itself, its documentation and the forums around it are quite rich in jargon, which is bad for your immediate understanding but forces you to do the research. So… you end up learning! I’m now even writing programs about cryptocurrencies! and people keep asking for personalized programs to view crypto stuff.
As I revolve around in the title of this article, Brave changed my relationship with YouTube, to a level that I now cannot watch any videos in its app or in its website on a regular browser. I now exclusively watch YouTube videos through the Brave browser. Because I got it with the ads!

Almost one year of Brave on my smartphone and on my laptop

This is what Brave looks like in my smartphone, here watching one of my favorite YouTube channels:

So yes, like a normal browser. But with the twist -whole point of this story- that when I’m on Youtube on Brave I see no ads, even if logged in with my account. Neither at the beginning of the video nor while it’s playing.

You’ll love this other feature

Another great feature of Brave for smartphones is that the video keeps playing when you change screen or app to do something else -something that doesn’t happen with Chrome, on my phone at least. This means I can keep enjoying music while doing other stuff, or even view videos on the side as I do any other thing!

For example, here I’m going through old photos while I keep listening to the video and even see it in the small rectangle (yes, you can move the video around):

Curious about rewards?

In exactly 10 months of Brave, I’ve made 10.25 BAT on my smartphone and 1.5 BAT on my laptop (not a typo, just 1.5).

This is lame, yes I know (notice though that from what I’ve read around you might get more BAT, or less, in other countries). And even worse if you consider that the BAT has barely passed the 1 USD exchange rate a couple of times ever since it exists. The usual exchange rate for BAT has been so far under 1 USD, and it’s right now (February 12th, 2022) around 0.9 USD. So right now I’ve obtained something like around 10 USD from a year of browsing.

If you are curious to know more about this, look at this screenshot from a web app I’m preparing based on web code like this and this. On the top you have the price evolution of the BAT, and on the bottom that of Bitcoin for comparison (yes, they are very correlated, here Pearson’s r is 0.878):

Want to give Brave a try?

Get Brave for free at https://brave.com/download/

And let me know how you liked it!

www.lucianoabriata.com I write and photoshoot about everything that lies in my broad sphere of interests: nature, science, technology, programming, etc. Become a Medium member to access all its stories (affiliate links of the platform for which I get small revenues without cost to you) and subscribe to get my new stories by email. To consult about small jobs check my services page here. You can contact me here.