When you sign up as a BAT publisher, you choose what currency to get paid in. It's just as easy to pick USD, and then it will auto-convert the BAT to dollars, and you would hardly even know it involves crypto. It's not some ponzi scheme.
But the amount of USD you get varies by BAT-USD exchange rate, e.g. you actually get paid in BAT, correct?
I must admit that I find this business model genius: replace website ads with your ads, pocket the revenue, and "pay" users in a self-issued cryptocurrency. Stealing ad revenue from websites while simultaneously doing an ICO.
That's correct. But advertisers bid in BAT too, so if the value drops, they would pay more nominally, and it would all balance out.
As a user, I prefer Brave's ads though. They're not actually on websites. And calling adblocking "stealing" seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Brave still pays out a larger share of their revenue to publishers than Google does. As a publisher, Brave's scheme seems fair to me too. The only one really hurt is Google.
I don’t dispute that you can get real money out the far end but even if you ignore the problematic aspects of crypto as a technology you still have to deal with the problematic aspects of it as a currency including rapid fluctuations in value and the time it takes to settle a transaction.
I guess that could a bit annoying at times, but ad revenue isn't some super precise amount. Price fluctuations should balance themselves out, and the minor settle time is not a big deal when you're typically paid monthly.
