Brave expands Basic Attention Token platform to YouTube

What is the technical advantage of Brave using a new token like BAT instead of directly using an existing cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that millions of people already hold, and will likely be less volatile in the long term?

I feel like a lot of ICOs are simply used to try to capture a piece of the cryptocurrency/ICO hype and avoid securities regulations, but there’s no advtange to users.

I don't see a technical advantage either.

But I wouldn't say there's no advantage to users-- an ICO can let the founders (a) raise funds, and (b) give them a financial incentive for the project to succeed.

So in theory, ICOs can help users win because they can lead to great products that otherwise wouldn't exist. (That said, a lot of teams/projects are total junk.)

That might be true in some cases (Brendan Eich, though?) but making your product more complex for the user just to raise easy money seems like a poor trade-off.

On top of that many ICOs seem to have unjustified valuations and reduced oversight from investors vs traditional fundraising.

See https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/862022787640082432 (from before our token sale).

We floated a User Growth Pool (UGP) of 300M tokens + 60M+ in reserve, created by fiat. These tokens were created before the sale and not sold. They're fungible, indistinguishable from other BAT created pre-sale for lockup to team & advisors, and from the one billion BAT sold on 5/31.

This idea was inspired by social credit currency, issued to citizens to endow them with funds. It can't be done with existing cryptocurrencies unless someone rich does it out of charity. The UGP has notional value between $40M and $110M. No moneybags in sight was volunteering to donate that much BTC or ETH to us.

We had two goals with the sale: endow the UGP, and fund the project. BAT is an ERC20 token so has many decimal places of fractional precision. As we grow, gain users who contribute starting from $0 cost to the user (via grants from the UGP, and even matching contributions for some months), prototype and ship user-paying private ads, and add other apps, BAT should become more valuable and our initial and matching grants can reduce to keep about the same value in USD or other fiats ($5 for initial grant, still working out matching details).

Hope this helps. We're playing the long game here. If the ecosystem expands and Ethereum solves scaling and anonymity on-chain, we will have the only decentralized, user-first and user-private/ZKP-anonymous funding model for the Web.

Here's a pie chart of token holders, where you can see the UGP+reserves, Bittrex (an exchange with BAT held for liquidity provisioning), the team+advisor lockup, and smaller accounts:

https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0x0d8775f6484306...