This is what a new cryptocurrency token called “Basic Attention Token” or BAT, along with the browser Brave aim to solve, and why I think they’re incredibly valuable!īAT, written by the creator of JavaScript, and founding team members of Mozilla and Netflix, is an open protocol based on this new “peer-to-peer internet” I’ve been preaching about for 5 years now. YOUR privacy is the goldmine of the current internet ecosystem. This is how they make money! Google operates the same way. When you visit Facebook, your profile information, the conversations you participate in, and even the websites you visit (via a pixel they give to publishers) all get stored somewhere on Facebook’s massive server infrastructure. That was 10 years ago! As a user on today’s web you don’t own your data. At the time there were open standards like “Information Cards”, which could be stored right inside the local client (aka browser), identifying you as a user, authenticating automatically with the website, no unencrypted credentials passed in the process, and only YOU would have the data stored on your device. The idea was that, with open standards and open technologies built right into the browser you would be able to visit site-to-site on the internet and each website would know exactly who you were, and there would be no reason to log you in. Back in 2009, before Bitcoin was invented, I talked about a world with an internet that had no login button.

Brave browser bat tokens