The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The road to Brave 1.0 and BAT (Interview)

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it's being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user's privacy.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at rollbar.com and we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to linode.com slash changelog. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Rollbar. Check them out at rollbar.com slash changelog. Move fast and fix things like we do here at Changelog. Catch your errors before your users do with Rollbar. If you're not using Rollbar yet or you haven't tried it yet, they have a special offer for you. Go to rollbar.com slash changelog.

Sign up and integrate Rollbar to get $100 to donate to open source projects via Open Collective. Once again, rollbar.com slash changelog. All right, welcome back, everyone. This is the Change Local podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at ChangeLog. Today, Jared and I are talking to Brian Bondi,

co-founder and CTO of Brave. We talk with Brian about all the beginnings of Brave the browser, how back came to be Brave Inc.'s basic attention token. This could be the driving future of how we offer incremental funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, we go deep into the historical as well as the technical details of Brave the Browser,

their March to Brave 1.0, and we spend the last segment of the show talking through BAT, how it works, how it's being used, and we also cover their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user's privacy. So, Brent, let's start this conversation where a conversation like this should start. Star Trek or Star Wars? Or both? I'm a Star Wars guy. My wife likes Star Trek.

I know Brendan is more of a Star Trek guy as well, but yeah. Does that cause a rift in your relationship? Having both sides of those fence represented in the family? It's like a red and blue living in the same. Yeah. She likes both. So I guess I'm lucky on that front. There you go.

I don't mind watching Star Trek, but, uh, I'm definitely more of a Star Wars fan. I asked that question cause I want to know who named the dog. Okay. Yeah. Um, probably my wife, uh, my wife's idea. Leah. Although we have another, uh, dog, an Australian shepherd and, uh, I wanted to call her Ray, um, on that thing.

Um, but she wanted to call her, uh, numeria after a game of Thrones, a dire wolf. Um, so she won. Well, that's in universes right there yeah exactly that's why that's why it sounds like she did yeah we're showing the full breadth of their their uh their culture you know it's like you know we we are in the times star trek right star wars and game of thrones i mean you can't wrong. It's a great family to be a part of. Yep, for sure. And I have a son named Link as well. Now you're pulling

on my heartstrings right there. Come on. That's my jam right there. All hackers are pumping their fists. You've validated yourself. Brian is very welcome

on our show now as you had all geek culture represent inside your household. That's spectacular. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So let's talk about on our show now as you had all geek culture represent inside your household that's right yeah thank you thank you so let's talk about you brave and bat you're the co-founder of brave and the cto previously con academy mozilla evernote maybe talk about this 0.1 on stack overflow you've spent a lot of time there let's stop there for a second did you just answer like everybody's questions or what's that mean top 0.1 is that like point totals um it just means like uh i guess i

was top 50 users or something or top even 20 users at one time uh but i think i still maintain to the top 0.1 percent but uh you just keep getting upvotes after a while uh so i stopped kind of stopped answering but i still get i think it's like the long tail of points huh yeah And they cap the amount of points that you can get per day. And I think I just automatically achieve those points every, every day. So I just kind of let it ride. But yeah, I was one of the early users there. And I did mostly C++ at the time. So I was answering mostly C++ questions and I was getting kind of bored with my current work. So I would just kind of refresh the page where the new questions were posted and I'd be the first one to get it in there.

And I would do like the most simple, easiest answer first. And then I would edit it and then add more and edit it and add more. And so probably every one of my answers was edited like 40 times. And you'd start to get upvotes even from the first answer. But the trick is really just to get in there first and answer if you want to be at the top of that site. Stack overflow strategies. I've never heard of such a thing. That's amazing. It seems to have worked out for you. What do you think you've gained from it? Assigned from obviously the point. He gets to put it in his Twitter bio.

Exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, if you think about how much money you spend for like university education that's one factor but um people also look at your stackoverflow bio so that's just another way to build up your your reputation i guess and just to show that you know what's going on but it's also to help people uh as well and uh it's because you generally enjoy it so um and and also you learn a lot just by answering things um that's true a lot of times i would just answer something in the most simple way that i knew and then do a little bit of research and improve my answers from there so yeah it's a great way to learn as well very cool let's get to brave because it's definitely the the thing that we're all here for and why we

invited you on the show and something that adam and i have both been somewhat excited about have both used uh this year and have had our own experiences, either still using it or swapping back and forth between our preferred browsers and Brave. Of course, Brendan Eich, your co-founder and very influential in JavaScript and the web in general. We've had him on Request for Commits,

definitely a bright spot of knowledge in our ecosystem. So a lot of attention there as well. Tell us about the Genesis. We like to hear the beginnings of things. Whose idea was this? Did Brendan sell it to you? Did you sell it to him? What did the original pitch sound like?

Give us that Genesis story. So I don't know how far back I should go, but I was at Khan Academy at the time working. And I was there for about a year and a half. And I had always really wanted to get into Khan Academy. So I finally had got in. I was really loving working there. And then a Twitter message came in from Brendan

just saying, please DM me. And so I wanted to DM him, but he wasn't following me. So I couldn't. So I did have his email. So I emailed him and I'm just kind of playing it cool. I'm like, what's up? Meanwhile, I'm turning to my wife who's next to me in bed.

I was on my laptop at the time and I'm like, holy crap, Brandon Mike just messaged me to direct message him. I don't know why. But yeah, apparently I made some list. I had worked at Mozilla before with him and I was delivering a lot of the features. So I was in a lot of the blogs um things like that i've recently done a metro style enabled uh browser from from scratch for uh for firefox um that was a project that was canceled last minute uh so anyways i delivered a lot of things and i made some list of people that he wanted to contact to start something in the future um so yeah we got to

talking this was late december 2014 maybe he just went to the top users on Stack Overflow and just started sorted by top users and started DMing. First one to DM me back gets this offer. Yeah, it didn't start as a co-founder situation. I think it started as he wanted me to do contract work. I think mostly because I was a good Windows programmer at the time and Windows is where most of the users were. So yeah, so we talked for about six months,

and after a while, he just asked me to go fly there, or he would fly back here. And I had three young kids at the time, three young boys, and it was kind of hard for me to travel at the time, so I just said, well, just tell me what's up, and then that's when he proposed to just at the time. So I just said, well, just tell me what's up. And then that's when he proposed to just start the company. So we secured funding from a company in China for 2.5 million. And that's how we got started. Really, right from the start, we had the plans to create like a desktop browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, as well as Android, as well as iOS. So it was

really just the two of us at the start we eventually got a third person and we were working on all these different products for these different operating systems all at once so it's pretty ambitious right from the start was the initial pitch let's build a browser was it was it bigger was there a bigger picture because we know brave has you know big ambitions especially with trying to supplant or subvert or, I don't know, replace traditional forms of advertising and have really a micropayments model. Was the financial side in there? Was it all about privacy? What was the initial idea behind Brave that got you excited and that Brendan

was excited about? Yeah, so I think he originally wanted to do maybe a mobile phone or something like that. But once he had contacted me, he had moved beyond that. I think a mobile phone is really hard to fund. You need just an astronomical amount of money to fund something like that. So yeah, so it was already decided that he was looking to do a browser when he contacted me.

I was pretty impressed with Brennan. I mean, obviously beyond his existing accomplishments but just having heard him on request for commits i was a behind the scenes person for that call like listening live because nadia michael hosted the show and i was behind the scenes producer and i'm listening to this conversation and it's like how the the history of the web from no perspective other than the one you can get from Brendan. And he has some, I don't know how to really describe his history aside from just extensive and in the trenches of it. And just how it had been funded, you know, from major corporations, the reasons why it was funded, the backstory on early browser wars.

Not only that, but like how ads have always played a, just monetization models have always played a place in it. So, you know, just kind of hearing that, like if you're listening to this show, I wouldn't say you have to go listen to Request Recommends episode 11 before this one, but it might do a service just to have some background on Brendan, maybe to precursor some of the things you'll uncover here, but that was such a phenomenal episode. And I never expected to get that kind of deep dive into the history of the web than that show right there. Seriously.

This is amazing. Yeah. He definitely has that, that depth there. And what's funny about him is that you can talk to him about any topic in the whole world and he kind of will talk the same way. So he's a definitely an impressive guy encyclopedia exactly yeah um but yeah the main reason why we started it was really

wanted to get uh users ownership of their own data um create a user first browser one that's not uh in service to um uh basically to the ad tech uh broken system that was out there. Yeah. So we want to use this to own their own data and really to, so that they could basically be valued for their attention that they're given to ads as well. Why do you think that aside from your awesomeness on Stack Overflow and your contributions to Mozilla and those things, why do you think, why do you think personally, like introspectively,

why do you think that you were the co-founder that he chose to work with? What was it the stuff to say, you know, your skillset or your background, given that you didn't even really know each other and to be such a crucial person for such a crucial, crucial future of clearly something he's been dreaming of for years. Why do you think you? Yeah, I've wondered that as well. And I've never actually heard the answer from, from Brendan. So that would be an interesting question to ask Brendan. But I think he's a smart guy. I think he, he,

he knew that I was someone that could get what he needed to get done. And it does take someone smart to realize that someone like me that's not, like I don't have a name out there like he does, for example. So just the fact that he found me, I think he's a pretty smart guy for that. But yeah, I've been a software developer for 25 years and literally living and breathing coding.

I've written HTTP, HTTPSbs um uh libraries smtp pop3 uh image file formats ftp protocols client and server um literally just non-stop coding for like 25 years so it's really really my passion and uh it's something i'm good at it was coding so um but but like you said like i i don't have a name out there so it's something i'm good at it was coding so um but but like you said like i don't have a name out there so it's pretty weird that he found me and chose me for it but maybe i was just there at the right time and uh was really entertaining his idea like i said we were communicating about it for about six months before it actually became something that how serious were those conversations during those six months? Did they start with what if to when are we going to?

It started with a slide deck that he had put together. This is what we could create, or this is what I want to create at that time. Really, my response was just like, this is how you do it. I would go into really deep detail about you're going to need this, this, this, and this. And I think he just really seen that from there is that that was something that could deliver. I don't know how many people he had contacted originally or how many people was on that original spreadsheet that he had. But maybe he contacted me as well because I was no longer at Mozilla. I had left a year and a half before that. So maybe he, I have no idea what his contract was like with Mozilla. Maybe he couldn't take some people from Mozilla.

And I just was one of the lucky ones that had gotten out already. So one of the things that I'm always impressed with people that can really think up, think systems level thoughts around a thing and have an idea from scratch and that Brennan had, and then you yourself say, okay okay here's how you would go about building this and this is something that you know I've done or tried to do throughout my career and I've been very good at it in the small and so one of the things we tend to do is invite people on that have ambitious projects such as a browser you know a browser is not just what you see on the screen there but there's so many aspects to, especially when you're trying to compete in mobile, on the desktop, with syncing, with all these other things.

And so don't give us the deep dive technical on where you went necessarily from day one until now, because where we are is about four years later. You're almost at a 1.0. We do want to talk about the big 1.0 release and the switch away from the electron front end to the chromium front end but probably a little bit later where do you begin to think of okay we want to build a browser here are some of our goals around privacy around security and these other things where do we start like what how did you go about thinking about that problem yeah so like one of the papers that really spoke to us right from the start was something from monica chew and choose that mozilla at the time and she had done this really great paper on tracking protection um and she had uh coded it and was

ready to ship and mozilla was just not willing to ship it um basically because they were worried about relationship with the advertisers that do tracking um so that was kind of like there's this great idea this great feature um the ability to stop all the trackers and it showed like the advantages and page load speed like you can get two to eight times faster page loading and uh so really uh i guess it was born on from thinking about that paper and just really executing on it and actually shipping it. And they're getting shipped. Yeah. How long did it take from, from scratch to something production?

Right. So when we first started coding it, there was a project called browser HTML by Paul, Paul Roger at Mozilla. And it really looked to be like, at the time I actually thought that Firefox would die and that Browser.html would become the new thing. Because Firefox is coded in this kind of old HTML-like language called Zool. And Browser.html was just using HTML5 technologies to deliver this browser.

It was created in React, I think, at the time as well. So that really looked like the system. And it was based on basically the same engine that Firefox OS was something called graphene. So the very first version of this we created was for graphene. And it was, we just called it brave at the time. And we just found that the API APIs were not built out enough yet. And also Browse.html eventually stopped getting momentum and so it died off. But we were really looking for, this was about six months in,

we realized it's going to be probably another six months if we need to build out all these APIs that we need. So we started to look at alternatives. We had this HTML5-based front end with JavaScript. And I had a background of a lot of C++ as well,

so I felt comfortable there. But the other people on our team didn't have that kind of experience. So we did consider Chromium front-end at that time. But we decided that we really need to get this shipped. We only had a limited amount of funding, so we needed to get the product out. So really it was at that point that we found Electron and we knew about it already,

but we decided to switch to Electron. And it only took us a month and a half to port it from the graphing system to Electron and then get the first, what we called a dev preview out. So this is really just, we just wanted to tell the world that we created something and here it is. We're working on it. So that kind of became the release channel over time. Because people just started adopting it. But one of the embarrassing

moments when we first released that, just for people to see what we were creating, it wasn't meant to be a release channel but uh eric lawrence uh had found i think it was him he found a command line switch that was being passed to disable the sandbox and the uh render processes um so yeah so that was an embarrassing moment um and the reason that i was doing that was because Node was being loaded into the renderer process but then disabled afterwards so we did a lot of work we basically completely forked Electron to remove

Node from the renderer processes completely enable the sandbox do a lot of other security things we tried to upstream them to Electron but they didn't want to take them mainly because we were adding in extensions and they didn't want to have extensions in Electron. Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting to show definitely the path taken towards a 1.0 and really the compromises along the way in order to ship, in order to have users. And then in order to maintain a certain level of security, you forked and maintained, did you call it Muon?

Yeah. Which is your fork of Electron with security fixes in these patches that they didn't necessarily want upstream. And then to kind of end up, you know, back where you would have started or did start right away, if it had been maybe just building it by yourself, you would have done it this way from the start but um once you got on the electron slash move on train and you know we're shipping product for a while yeah what's the the big move away then is is for what purpose yeah so we're originally just kind of waiting for upstream chromium patches to to come down from electron that we could just consume them and not have to spend our resources doing those rebases so every time chrome comes out with a new version, it's a massive rebase. What we found was that they didn't really care that much about being on the latest Chromium.

And to us, that was like a major security no-no. Something that you really can't do if you're chipping a browser. In their defense, Electron was never meant to be used for a web browser. And we just started using it that way. So it made a lot more sense for us to be on the latest version than it did for them. But yeah, so rebasing, it really took us two engineers and it took about six weeks to do. Wow. And every single time that there's a new Chrome version. So if you look at the amount of cost that goes into that,

it's probably about like 50 grand every Chrome rebase, which is an insane amount that goes into it. Because every time we did a Chromium rebase as well, there'd be a lot of things broken that we'd have to fix. We'd have to have QA find. They're on like a six-week schedule, aren't they? How often are they shipping new versions? Yep, six-week schedule.

So we've really seen, um, the way that they, if they want to make a change to Chrome, they would basically copy, uh, a C plus plus source file, um, into a different directory and then they make changes to it.

And that really is not a good way to maintain a code base over a long time. Um, what you should do instead is, is like, uh, create subclasses of, of, uh,

delegates and observers, create your own observers, and do it that way, and have very, very minimal patching and zero copied files. So I guess one of the advantages of being on Electron is that we've seen a lot of things not to do for a browser where the prime importance is always being up to date on the Chromium upgrades. And so when we did the Chromium rebase, it took us 11 months. It is shipped right now on our website, by the way.

It's not called 1.0 yet. We'll get there. But the rewrite is done and out there. It's just not called 1.0 yet. That's right. Yeah. It's called 055X. I think we're just about to ship 056x and eventually we'll just skip to 1.0 so one of the side benefits of that switch i believe and i've seen people you know trolling around in the subreddits talking about different features and and one of the things we'll probably talk about this more when we talk about adoption because that's a huge part of the conversation i believe and one

i think adam has lots to say about as well um is that you get more access to all of the extensions that will run in chrome without any like those are kind of free to you guys is that is that a correct assessment that's correct yeah yeah and then move on we only had support for six or seven different extensions and just adding a new one was a lot of work. And we found that the Chrome rebases were often breaking the extensions that we did support that we'd have to keep refixing. So by doing this switch, it automatically gave us support for every Chrome extension by default. Now we do have like shields inside, like things like blocking the trackers, HTTP to HTTPS upgrades. We do have shields in those. Those also equally apply to the extensions. like things like blocking the trackers, HTTP to HTTPS upgrades.

We do have shields in those. Those also equally apply to the extensions. So there can be some extension, kind of like web compat issues, like the equivalent to web compat, extension compat. But for the most part, all extensions pretty much work out of the box. As Jared mentioned, we have been users of Brave, but not daily or complete switchers. I found myself ebbing and flowing from comfortability in Chrome to, you know, the daring worlds of a new web, really, in Brave, which is. Yeah, I always said that.

I mean, to use the old Brave, it's something that you kind of felt like you should do, but you didn't want to do. And the new rewrite is really it's just I actually want to start Brave. I don't find myself just automatically going to the Chrome icon anymore. I just want to be in Brave. I'm not trying to force myself. Well, for me, it's less around the browser and its features and more around the web and the lack of, I guess, just the weirdness the web is. Whenever you have a more secure and more private web, you're browsing. Like the experience is faster, obviously, but much different.

And in some cases, just plain old broken, which I have plenty of feelings about. But on the extensions front, I think we were talking about it in Slack recently, Jared. I just went ahead and removed every extension. I was like forget extensions i'm done with them i don't even want to be slow or you know uh privacy concerned or security concerned i'm like what why don't i just use brave and that's when i was like i'll just start using brave more often if i want to be like in a scenario where it's about security and privacy and just trying to enjoy the web, so to speak. Yeah. So, I mean, I've been, I don't have, I didn't have that experience that you had, Adam, because I've been using AdBlocker for my entire life, pretty much.

So you're used to it. Yeah. You're used to just like, you know, oh, this website doesn't quite work unless you enable this one particular little thing. Because, you know, there's some sort of, there's some sort of thing waiting for this thing to fire and then the rest of the website will work so you get those crappy websites where it's like yeah i have to re-enable this one little script but you figure those out once and then you kind of move on and for the most part on content sites it's like if your content can't load without these scripts i just there's plenty of things to read you know know, I just move on close to that, but on banks and like those particular sites where you have to, you have to

kind of finagle with it to get it to work without just giving them the world. Um, I've kind of been used to that. So I didn't have that particular holdup when using brave. Um, but it's funny how minor things can get in the way when you have something that you use all day, every day. And so for me, I used Brave just this fall for a couple of weeks as my primary browser. I still use Chrome as development browser. I've always done that. I use Safari on desktop as my primary browser and I use Chrome just for development. I've done that for years. And so now I was going to get rid of Safari in my my day-to-day and use brave as my primary and chrome as my dev environment and everything was was pretty good

i mean pretty much a one-for-one and then the thing that kept just sticking with me and i don't say this to like submit a bug report or anything just to say that it's funny how these small things become big it's almost like that old fable with the was the prince and the pea or i don't know the pea underneath the bed where it felt like a boulder it was like the mac os's emoji picker wouldn't always open in brave it would open like one out of four times or something okay and hopefully when we get to the chromium version that's just gone but that was just bugging the crap out of me and finally i'm like not worth it i'll try again in six months you know there's so many things like that like um the old repository

had something like 4 000 different issues and uh it's just a long tail of small things like that that's hard it'll probably it would have taken us a couple years really to get through that backlog um so that that was another big motivation other than extensions to go to the new um we call the brave core um just because automatically we close out like 4 000 issues all at once and uh all the little things that'll that'll drive people nuts is now fixed so so the little things get in people's way those are blockers and those are things that either people have to either get over or just not convert or eventually those things get smoothed out but what are the big tentpole features for those out there who

haven't tried brave like adam and i have so we're assuming people understand a lot we've mentioned privacy but if you could just give braves big cells of why to use it instead of a chrome or instead of a safari or even a firefox what are the the tentpole features yeah so i mean if you're an advanced power user, you're already familiar probably with a lot of these features, but a lot of us aren't, or a lot of us just don't want to have to bother in the setting at all up properly. But I'll get into some advantages for that too later of why it's better not to use extensions. But out of the box, there's ad blocking, there's tracking protection, there's an HTTPS everywhere implementation. So upgrading links that could be served as HTTPS,

but there's a link to them with HTTP will automatically upgrade those to HTTPS. Cookie blocking, there's an implementation of no script picked written as well. So that's just the ability to completely block scripts and then selectively enable them just for the ones you want. So that kind of completely will break your web experience for most sites, but then some people just prefer to browse that way. And then also fingerprinting protection. So fingerprinting is like just little bits of entropy

that websites can collect and use to create a unique fingerprint against you. Things like your user agent, your fonts that are installed, your screen resolution, your operating system. So that's all baked right in. These are all things that you could get if you install like four or five different extensions, but it's just easier just to download Brave and have everything working all at once. Now we could have just created like a Chrome browser with all this, all these extensions just by default packaged in. But we instead decided to create like our ad block library is a C++ implementation. So it's faster than a JavaScript based one, as well as we can do it like on the network thread before, which an extension can't do. So there's little advantages like this, like performance and better security.

And really, there's so many things that your browser reaches out to the Google service for that we disable. And if we were just an extension, we couldn't do those things either. The extension route is interesting because I was thinking like you know obviously i was doing something like that and jared's used an ad blocker as he had mentioned so he's kind of doing a brave but not a brave browser and other browsers like at least the features that you just mentioned in terms of like security privacy and just making the web better for the individual as they feel to curtail it you You know, it's like if you go and choose these extensions, but then you kind of give up, you know, some assumptions to those extensions that they are, one, legit, which in most cases they probably are,

or two, they haven't been circumvented, i.e. they're open source, they have the best protocols for security, like 2F on their GitHub repos, they haven't got an attacker that somehow slipped some code in there you're putting a lot of trust in someone else whereas in the case here of brave it seems like you were like let's go back to the roots here and ensure that at these basic levels we have a browser that gives people the assurances that they can browse the web safely

and then having brendan have such a rich history of desiring a better web, as he said, you know, either on requests or commits or other shows or other areas, you know, in his mission to the very first thing you see big is a woman in a hoodie with the Brave logo. And the rate beneath that is you are not a product, period. That's a statement. Why do you feel that statement is such a crucial thing for you to communicate to people who are like, was Brave. Yeah, I mean, the reason why it's so important is what we were just talking about. If you have this set of extensions, you're not just getting the same level of privacy, really, because you're trusting Google and you're letting Google treat you as their product, basically.

So one of the reasons why we have the browser is because we want to cut that all out. We don't want you to trust Google. We don't even want you to trust Brave, really. We don't store any data on our servers whatsoever about users. All the data that exists is just going to be only on your browsing machine. Even our sync implementation works that way. We will store stuff on S3, which is encrypted,

but it's encrypted on your machine, not our servers. There's no way to get that out. Also, if you have extensions, you have things like, let's say, Adblock Plus. How that works is they have paid ad deals with certain companies to let certain ads through. So there's really just this level of trust that you have to give up. And you have so much more control, basically, with the browser. And that kind of gets into the whole digital advertising.

I don't think that would be possible to do in the same way as an extension just because we need like local machine learning to, to understand your data. And then if you opted in to turn on ads, you block everything by default and then it's an opt-in thing at that point. If you do that, then it can use your local data. Nothing from our servers. Just basically your browser will download a catalog of ads, match that to the local data, and then present you with advertising. And why in the world would you ever want to

turn on advertising? And that's where BAT comes in is because you can get paid for that using a basic attention token. You know, if there was, I would actually potentially be an enabler of ads if there was some sort of standard that said, do it ethically. You know, if there was some sort of, if it wasn't such a, I don't even want to be enraged on this show. Cause it's not, it's not my MO, but like, I just wish there was a better way for the world of the web because it's not my MO, but I just wish there was a better way for the world of the web

because clearly it's been a good model. It's been there since the beginning. But it's just terrible for user experience. I hate that my future presence to my wife get ruined because we're on the same IP address and next thing you know, Facebook or Instagram or whatever, is advertising to her either what I plan to buy or what I bought for her. So this is one small thing, but it just drives me crazy, the standards of advertising. I just wish there was a better way. They had a do not track header spec.

I mean, you're just asking the server not to track you. But they don't do it, right? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, they don't need to listen. And why would they listen if they can make money off your data? This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform built with simplicity at the forefront. So managing infrastructure is easy. Whether you're a business running one single virtual machine or 10,000, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so teams can build, deploy, and scale cloud apps faster and more efficiently.

Join the ranks of Docker, GitLab, Slack, HashiCorp, WeWork, Fastly, and more. Enjoy simple, predictable pricing. Sign up, deploy your app in seconds. Head to do.co.changelog. And our listeners get a free $100 credit to spend in your first 60 days. Try it free. Once again, head to do.co.changelog. So listeners, we take breaks obviously right but during those breaks sometimes we have some conversation and we learn a little bit about our guest and we ask brian uh because we say hey do

you have anything to drink nearby go ahead and get a drink of water or whatever and uh brian didn't share because he felt he was better on the show so brian how well did you prepare for your drinks what do you got next to you uh so every day i uh i drink a couple of uh extra large tim hortons coffees um i also got a water here and a gatorade but uh i i consume coffee well prepared time before bed well prepared and a proper canadian with tim hortons nearby that's right and we had a little bit of crossover too, in terms of our, our geographical paths in the, in the past,

we were both prior residents of Kingston, which is a city in Ontario, which is where you live. I don't know where you live at in Ontario now, but we were both that area. Why were you there? Was it interesting? Yeah.

So I worked at a army simulation center there. And the reason i worked there was because um when i was at university as part of the uh university of waterloo as part of the co-op program there um so they have uh six to eight placements that you do um and one of those placements was for army simulation center another one was for corral uh corporation and the last two was actually for my last startup before this one, which I ran for about 10 years. I didn't tell the University of Waterloo that it was my own company at the time. But one of the things that you have to do is you have to get

your employer to give you an evaluation. So needless to say, I had like an outstanding evaluation for my own company since I did my own review. And that helps you to block ads how? It's interesting having that kind of pass, but I'm really curious how that teed up for your back into the ad discussion we're going on, like the qualities of it and being able to block it at the, what layer was it that you mentioned versus the JavaScript layer? Oh, just like on the networking thread,

basically for that, yeah. Yeah, no, that was kind of intended, Joel. It made sense to bring it in for the listeners, but we got to bring it back to ads because that's where we left off and they're listening to get back into that. Let me hard transition because I had something I was going to say

prior to the break that I'll just bring it in hard and we can go off of that is that historically, I have been very skeptical of security or privacy-focused software products, specifically DuckDuckGo previously, and also Brave when I first heard about it, because of the human instinct to throw out privacy and security as soon as they need to trade it for convenience

or something shiny or a feature. I mean, we've continuously thrown our privacy under the bus in order to get the new feature of this thing. And that made me think, can you actually build a movement or a user base or get momentum around products that are specifically offering privacy and security as the primary features. And I used to say no to that, but I feel like DuckDuckGo as well as Brave, I mean, you guys

now have probably more than the last announcement I heard was 4 million active users. Yeah, I'm sure about that now, but an amazing number from zero to four million in such amount of time and i'm wondering if maybe we hit the tipping point where people are starting to wake up to the results of trading in our privacy all these years for shining new things and thinking we need to like step back from the ledge a little bit and protect these things what are your guys thoughts on on that trend yeah I don't think that probably our biggest marketing point is that we're a privacy-based browser. Not everyone really understands privacy or the need for privacy,

but people do understand speed. So when you're just not loading more than 50% of an average web page, you can really see the difference in speed and people understand speed pretty easily. There's also the point that just people are kind of tired of like Google and Facebook, so just being the, the anti Google browser that gives you the same kind of functionality kind of speaks for itself and then there's also the, the cohort that, that, that wants to try out the user private ads and wants to

basically make money for, for giving out their attention, which is free, free to do. I think for me, it's, it's just like, I'm with you, Jerry, where it's been an evolution.

I think for a while there, we were like, what's the worst that could happen. And I've always been skeptical. Don't, don't, don't just think I'm just blindly, naively using everything that the bad people have to offer thinking they'll never harm me

no i've always suspected they eventually would but given today's just like wow it's just you know every day you're talking about a data breach or some sort of trade as you said jared the trading of our information for something that they get that is definitely not beneficial to us. Let's just leave it there on that. Like having that be a daily headline on the repeat for, you know, three particular companies essentially, but seems almost like monthly now or weekly at some cases is like enough is enough, you know, now I still do use Chrome, but I realize that there are better ways. And I'm not even sure if Brave is there yet, which is kind of like part of this call and this discussion. But it's like we are being more aware of our privacy and we are being more aware, I think, as a society that we have traded so much.

And now we need to take it back. Yeah. So like Google will say, like, don't be evil. And although they do have good intentions, like you said, there can be a data breach or maybe they're just going to change their mind over time. So the difference with us is that we just put ourselves in a position that we can't be evil. We don't store any user data whatsoever. So even if there was some kind of a data breach in our servers, there's no users at at risk there's no breach at all that really happened at that point i like that i mean you can't be evil if you can't be evil right right that's that's actually uh you should change uh you're not a product to we can't be evil we can't be yeah yeah so we we put our intentionally put ourselves in positions that we can't change our mind later. Ads aren't the worst thing, though. I mean, what else are the bad players, the key players that are bad aside from ads?

In what context do you mean? In terms of privacy and security. I mean, obviously it's your user data and stuff, but what layers do we go down? Yeah. I mean, there's just a story the other day, maybe yesterday, that came out about an extension that was harvesting, I think, Facebook passwords. Yeah, there's malware that gets installed often through ads, but also with different mechanisms as well. Like I said, when you load one web page, more than 50% of it

is just a slew of crap that you don't want. Right, yeah. So one of the things I like to bring up is that when we talk about evil or not evil, we talk about things going well or not well, specifically with Google and I guess with other advertising-based companies, it's about alignment of incentives. So like you said, Brian,

it's not like there's bad intentions necessarily. That doesn't mean that everybody has good intentions. But when you assign evilness to a corporation, you need to realize that that corporation is a homogenous group of lots of people trying to do good and trying to make money for shareholders. And that incentive on how they make that money

is what ends up crossing the user's best interests, right? So the shareholder's best interest is above the end user's best interest. And that's why your guys' pitch is you are not a product, but it's somewhat, I think, a slippery slope to personify an evil empire, but very, very powerful marketing technique. So, I mean, I go back to the Get Firefox campaign

back in what, 04, 05? I mean, I go back to the get Firefox campaign back in what, oh four or five. I mean, when, when, when Firefox was taking over, there was a single evil empire and it was internet explorer and Microsoft. And it was the giant in the room, right?fox is the anti-microsoft or the anti-internet explorer and there was like grassroots movements and i remember even my little brother uh was the first person that showed me firefox and it was like an evangelical moment for him to like you need to use to show me a more excellent way which was firefox versus what i had previously known um now i mean of course you can set brave against google but there's lots of browsers out there it's not just chrome even though chrome is i think dominant in the marketplace 70 share or something like that yep but there is firefox there is uh there is safari there are even smaller ones that we cover. I think Min is a new one. There's one called Vivaldi.

There's lots of browsers out there, which is awesome. But do you think it's potentially harder to kind of mount an offensive today than it was back when Firefox took hold? And what kind of market share is Brave hoping for? Are you trying to become a 10%? Do you have goals of complete market domination? Or can you carve out your own little niche and still survive and make a dent in the world? We can definitely survive without having domination or anywhere close to that. But I wouldn't necessarily cap us at anything either. I think that Chrome won't last forever

as the dominant, even though it's the dominant today. But you might not think that, but you could say the same thing about an explorer in the past. I've been using Firefox right from the start when it's called Phoenix. And then they had some kind of trademark issues that go to Firebird and they had another trademark issue. And so they went to Firefox and I think maybe their market cap got up to 50% or so. I don't know exactly, but yeah, I mean, these, sorry, I might've been saying market cap, I meant user share. But I guess the user share, we, we hope to get, I guess a lot. I like that. We hope to get a lot, as many as we can. I like his, his consideration of his words. And hope to get a lot, as many as we can. I like his consideration of his words.

And then I guess a lot. It's like, well, we just did an actual number here and then like undershoot it. But then like once we hit 20%, we're done. Yeah, we're looking for. I mean, I definitely believe roughly 100. So I definitely am with you that just because chrome is the biggest browser today that doesn't mean it will be tomorrow i was going back and looking at some of the global stat counters just trying to track back to where things were back in the day and the furthest went back was

09 but back then you had uh 2009 ie was still at 62 percent This is March of 2009. Firefox was around 30. And Chrome had just come onto the scene. It was at about 4, 5%. And so in less than 10 years, it's dramatically changed, right? Chrome's at 60%. Safari's at 15%. Firefox at 5. And then IE's down at 2.87%.

And that was a swing, right? Go back another 10 years and it was probably IE at 90% or more. So these things change and they change often and fast. That's right. Yeah. And I joked that we want 100%, but we don't really want 100% because you really want to have competition because that spurs better products. And just the openness.

If you did have 100%, you could introduce something proprietary and lock others out, and we wouldn't want that either. So the more implementations, the better. So that's why Firefox has been declining in market share for quite some time. But I hope they find a base at some point so that just for web compat issues, there's not just one implementation that rules at all. Maybe give us a zoomed out version of this. State of browsers, basically.

Where are we going? You know, where is Brave leading? Where is Brave following? What's the state of browsers at large in terms of like what they're trying to deliver to grow their markets or maintain their markets? And I guess, you know, in this case, not saying markets, maintain their markets and i guess you know in this case not saying markets more like user bases as you said you know what's the state of browsers happening today from your point of view um well i think people are opening up a lot more to adblock like

you start seeing that uh more and more just as built-in features i think opera has some form of it um i guess everyone has a different goal, though. Like Vivaldi is more looking at different UI things that they can do that they find would be useful. Mozilla is bringing in Rust code and trying to go for more performance. They do have the Servo project, but I'm not sure if that's actually going to ever happen or not. I think they're still doing well with it,

but they started bringing in big components from that to make themselves more performant. We're also using Rust code now in Brave for some things as well for the same reason. It's a safer way to code. I guess everyone has different reasons and different motivations. There's always new sensors on different devices, for example, and new web APIs that you can take advantage of. So there's never a shortage of things to work on. Jared, when you mentioned the growth of Chrome, that's where I, and I may not be the perfect person to ask where the growth come from.

It seems like their growth came from being the developers preferred. I guess, yeah, fast, but developers preferred. Chrome came out and it was fast and it was lightweight. Right. I mean, it just blew everything else out of the water. And then, of course, the development environment. Right, advancing the web standards. Yeah, I think today what keeps specifically developers inside of Chrome,

now when I say developers, I'm pluralizing myself. What keeps me there is DevTools. And it's not that other browsers don't have good DevTools because I've used Firefox as their good. Safari is for a long time, back when both Chrome and Safari were on WebKit, they shared a DevTools and that was awesome. And now they're different, but they're similar,

but it's just familiarity inside of the Dev tool so from a from a web developer's perspective ryan do does brave use the same dev tools that chrome has is that a place where you're competing or hoping to just have the same thing or are you lacking there yeah we didn't used to have the exact same tools um with moon but now we have the exact same tools with the rewrite since we're using the Chrome in front. That's a huge advantage. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think like market share-wise,

you're saying that Chrome was probably because of speed and maybe security just by having things out of process. I think Firefox probably originally had the edge because they were willing to do pop-up blocking that no one else was willing to do. So they got users from that. And I mean, now we're doing things that other browsers are were willing to do pop-up blocking that no one else was willing to do so they got users from that um and i mean now we're doing things that other browsers are not willing to do as well so when you get to a certain size you worry more about protecting that size and not pissing off people when you start you kind of stop caring about uh putting

users first so that's why i think the little guy always has an advantage there because they can do things that the bigger guys can't another thing thing that you do, which I think was just recently added, is you actually built in Tor right into the browser. Can you talk about the implications there, how that was built? I think it's nice because this is always something that's been available to nerds and power users, but more difficult for everyday people to go and browse anonymously via Tor. Now, if it's just a built-in button in your browser, that opens it up with a whole new class of users. Yeah.

So like you were talking about, users are willing to kind of give up their privacy a little bit too easily sometimes. So Tor is really a way to, even if you have done that in the past, you can just open up a new Tor identity right away. And you can start browsing the one thing that you want to keep private in your altar universe, private like that.

So it's kind of just nice to not have to have the Tor browser installed separately. And also the Tor browser is a Firefox space. So this kind of gives you a different, different outlet to, to explore that with. I love the disclaimer. It gives you Tor high drive P address and all these things.

And basically says the web might suck. Basically. It's a lot slower when you're using Tor, but sure. And it is pretty terrible. So I would say that you would probably use it in cases where you're like doing something where maybe you're shopping for gifts. Like I try to do and not let them be revealed through IP stuff.

Does that, does Tor in a, for those who are not very familiar with Tor, maybe even myself included since I don't use it too often, I understand the basics of what it is, but why was it important for you to implement this into Brave and what does it actually do for a user? Yeah, I mean, the Tor browsing experience, it really does what most people think private browsing does. So most people think that what it should do, yeah. All that private browsing really does is not store what you're looking at locally so that if someone else from your family goes into your computer later they don't see the history of where you've been. But really your data is being speeded out there anyways and you're being fingerprinted

and things like that. So Tor really gives you just not the local privacy but also um the remote uh privacy as well so i mean when you're traveling the internet your ip uh different things about you are not available to the website you're going to basically that's right yeah there's some there's some apis that are disabled um it uses on in routing so you're never making a direct connection um from from your client to an endpoint server you're basically going through a different series of uh of nodes in between each taking out the layer of encryption on each step which is why it's slow because it's onion routing you around before you get to your final destination so yeah it's necessarily slow it's not just like oh they should make this faster.

It's like, no, it's going to speed of light through like 15 servers or whatever on every request. Yeah, there's other problems too. Like if you search on Google, you'll get like a captcha thing right away pretty much because they detect something's a little bit off or weird or they don't like the exit node that it's using. So it's not the best experience,

but it does give you that extra privacy. This episode is brought to you by our search partners at Algolia. Algolia is a powerful search as a service solution and it's easy to integrate and use with API clients, UI libraries, and even pre-built integrations. If you've ever searched Hacker News, Teespring, Medium, Twitch, or even Product Hunt, then you've experienced the search results of Algolia's search API. We even used Algolia here at ChangeLog to power our search. We're able to fine-tune our indexing, gain insights from search patterns, as well as analytics.

We can create custom query rules to influence our content's ranking behavior. We have full control. It's awesome, and we love it. Check the show notes for a link to get started for free or learn more by going to Algolia.com. That's A-L-G-O-l-i-a dot com and by go cd go cd is an open source continuous delivery server built by thoughtworks check them out at go cd.org or on github at github.com slash go cd go cd provides continuous delivery out of the box with this built-in pipelines, advanced traceability, and value stream visualization. With GoCD, you can easily model, orchestrate, and visualize complex workflows from end to end with no problem.

They support Kubernetes and modern infrastructure with Elastic on-demand agents and cloud deployments. To learn more about GoCD, visit gocd.org slash changelog. It's free to use, and they have professional support and enterprise add-ons available from ThoughtWorks. Once again, gocd.org slash changelog. so one major topic when it comes to brave that we've touched on but we haven't focused on we'll focus on now is the basic attention token so you got a cryptocurrency inside the browser and potentially i want maybe not the first but one of the only real world use cases so far for cryptocurrencies aside from the straight up value transfer of bitcoin and and everybody else that can just transfer a value is this token that's all about attention and using it inside brave Brave. It's very cool to see a cryptocurrency

actually being used for a real-world use case and providing value. Tell us all about it and we'll ask our questions once you give us the lay of the land of the way that works, how it works in Brave, and what you guys are doing with it. Sure. Basically, Attention Token, the whole concept is just to value

a user's attention and to be able to reward them. We did an ICO in May 2017. The ICO was on the Ethereum network. It's an ERC20 token. We raised $36 million in 26 seconds. I remember I even tried to buy some myself and I reloaded the page to see if it was at the right block number yet

and by the time it reloaded it was already over so I actually missed out on it it's rare when you meet someone I met one person, I think he's an employee from Coinbase that said he actually did get in on time to buy some and I was impressed by that well those Coinbase employees they're on top of it

yep as part of that I was impressed by that. Well, those Coinbase employees, they're on top of it, you know. Yep. As part of that, what we did was we issued 1.5 billion tokens, 300 million of that. And this is one of the big reasons why we did a token in the first place was to create something called the user growth pool. And that was really just to be able to give people free bat for either referring people. Like if you go to, I think, brave.com slash refer, you can sign up to be to get a referral link, basically. And every user that you refer that uses the browser for at least something like a certain number of days, they get five dollars in bat for that. And also just to give anyone that's using the browser free grants so that they can basically pay the publishers and reward them while we're working on the ad system.

So tell us how it works inside of the browser. There's a set of bat-enabled websites, or can any website receive your bat? And then how does it get divvied out kind of give the lay of the land of how you know as one user uses the web inside of brave what that means for different website publishers and for the user yeah so any website at all on the web can can get basically bat sent to them you can also sign up for to be a publisher and if you don't sign up to be a publisher, we'll automatically email you after you reach some certain threshold. And then as a user,

you give away some free bat to play with, right? So I download Brave, I get some bat, something like 25 tokens. And as I browse, I can turn it on, turn it off. I can participate or not. But as I browse the web on Brave, is it based on how long I've been on certain websites for a given time period?

It's divvied out? Yeah, so there's different things. There's different things that we do, especially with the new Brave browser. We kind of reworked how this all works. But as you browse the web, there's something called auto-contribute. And you can set up to automatically pay based on your browser history like that.

You could also just go to either like a YouTube publisher, Twitch publisher, or creator rather, or a website. And you can send a tip like on demand right away for whatever amount you want. And then if you actually sign up to be a publisher, you can configure a lot of things of how it will be presented to users that are on your site as well like the amounts about to send for example the banner the banner to display when the tipping window comes up using the new brave it's pretty interesting where you can in the right hand corner see the um the known bat triangle icon and you click that, and it pops down and shows you your wallet

and actually shows you that you're on a Brave Verified publisher. Of course, I'm on changelog.com talking about this. So if you're listening somewhere and you want to open up a tab, sure, why not? Go ahead and go to changelog.com and follow my direction here. But it's pretty interesting. You have a button here that says send a tip. And I find this kind of interesting because we've always been kind of been pulled into this get you know pay with your attention model and it's never been attached to something

so foundational to a user's day-to-day usage in or software habits like a browser this i don't know jared am i crazy is this the first time? It's the first time, right? Cryptocurrency available to give it out. It's based on attention. Right now, my attention is slightly higher towards changelog.com over brave.com. I've been to two sites in this new Brave browser app install. So 61% of my attention is going to our site, changelog.com, and the other 39 percent is going to Brave.com. So does that mean I'm automatically giving those two sites just my attention and I can divvy it later?

Or is there some sort of auto, like you said, it's auto contribute, right? Yeah, that's right. So it'll automatically figure out what to do. And you can set like a monthly budget of how much you want to give out. So there's basically a consolidation period that happens once a month currently. We might lower that to be more frequent later. But once you hit that

monthly amount, I think it's defaulted to maybe 15 baht. It'll give out from the 25 baht that you get for free just by installing it. Yeah, it'll pay out using the anonymized protocol, so your anonymity is preserved that way. So only that local browser knows your browsing history to do the payouts?

That's right. Correct. Yep. Pretty cool. So take me through this as an end user of Brave. Let's say my 25 bat are gone, but I'm down. I'm into this idea, and I support indie publishers like, like changelog.com and others. Are there any others?

That's the one that matters. Let's say I'm a supporter and I'm like, I want to give my actual USD to these people. I get like, how do I go? I got a hundred bucks in my pocket or let's just say it's in my bank account because that's probably easier than my pocket cash. How do I get bat into brave to set it all up and and distribute money that's not the 25 free tokens or 25 free tokens um yeah so you can add funds whether it's through um you can put different cryptocurrencies in you can get bat spit out um so there's there's probably the average user wouldn't want to do that but you you can definitely put in funds that way.

The way that the whole system will work, once everything is completely working, later this year we'll be launching ads. And when you turn that on, by default ads are off, but if you want to turn it on, you can then get paid in back, which then can float to the websites that you visit. The ads will be delivered to user private, so your user data is not on any servers anymore.

It's just on the machine. And yeah, you get paid for your attention that way, so you wouldn't have to put money in that way. But users can put in, like I said, whether they put in BAD or Ethereum or Litecoin. There might be some other options. They can also go to U uphold and and uh and and buy through that way as well so once you have some crypto you can get it in the bat and get it in

the brave via the kind of traditional crypto wallet transfers basically yeah yeah we keep doing we keep doing these grants from that user growth pool that i said even to existing users um until like ads is launched at least we'll keep doing it as well just to give up more yeah so tell us about ads because that's the point where I start to wonder and we talked about the incentive of google or the incentive of ad companies because basically the way ads is going to work as I understand it is as an end user I can turn ads on and it's like okay block all the regular ads but show me these classy awesome brave ads and i will look at them for like some very small amount of bat which eventually adds up and then i can take that bat and redistribute it or i can cash it out for uh you know to buy

myself a lollipop or something but i mean isn't then aren't you guys basically a new ad platform aren't you haven't you become evil empire in that case? Cause now you're the ad network. I wouldn't say that we're the ad network. I would say that your machine is the ad networks. I guess that's the difference is that like your user data, which is normally, um,

like I said, speed across a bunch of different servers is now only on your machine. You're just downloading a catalog and locally matching what you want to give out. I mean, the current, the current ad system is, I mean,

it's slow, um, to load a page. It adds more than two times the amount of things that you want to give out. I mean, the current, the current ad system is, I mean, it's slow, um, to load a page. It adds more than two times the amount of things that you need to download. It costs you money in your data plan. Um, there's creepy aspects to it, which you, you said like, um, um, it doesn't really work for users. It doesn't work for advertisers either because the current ad system, there's a lot of fraud. $16 billion in the U.S. in 2017 alone. And then it also doesn't work for creators because there's declining revenue because of all these problems as well. So the only company, I guess, that it does work for is Google and Facebook.

So like any smart network, though, it's powered by machine learning. Do you know much about that part of this, or are you playing at a different level when it comes to the ads and future of Brave ads? Yeah, most of the machine learning type work is being done by Ben Lipschitz, who's our chief scientist. So he's working on that stuff. Cool.

We'll have to get Ben on practical AI, which if you're a listener of the Change Log and you're not listening to Practical AI, shame on you. There's two easy ways you could do that. One, you can go back to your podcast client and just search for Change Log Master. That's our master feed. It's the easiest way, actually. You get some bonus content that only hits that master feed.

Or you can be cool and just subscribe to Practical AI directly by searching just for Practically I and subscribing to that or going to changelog.com slash Practically I and look forward to a future show on Brave and data science machine learning with he said his name is Ben? Yeah. Ben, cool. Yeah, that'd be an awesome show. We'll see you later. Continue explaining this to me now as from an advertiser's

perspective so now let's let's turn change along around from publisher let's look at us from an advertiser maybe we want more people to listen to yeah practical ai so we would like to advertise practical ai to brave to brave users um are we then paying like do do I get some bat as an advertiser and say, okay, George, George is my hypothetical user, I will pay you this bat in order to look at my advertisement? Or am I paying Brave Inc. as a middleman and then Brave Inc. is putting the ads? Is it a direct relationship between the advertiser and the viewer of the ad? Or is there also a middle company involved? No, it still goes through brave and you upload your creatives there like we have a whole different portal that you'd go to but yeah you

would buy um bat in that case and the whole system works on bat um but you might not even need to to buy bat because you might be already earning bats you could just then um use the bat that you have earned on your website just from casual users to then buy ads with as well. So kind of like a whole ecosystem like that. There's different types of things that you can do. Like we have browser ads. And again, this is opt-in, so not enabled by default. But there's browser ads, which is completely separate from a website. In that case, I think Brave takes 30% in that case, and the user gets 70% of that money. And then there's publisher ads, and the publisher has to opt in for this. So if you want to enable ads on your website for the Brave users,

the publisher would then get 70% of the ad money. Brave would get 50%, and the user would get 15% in that case as well. So going back to what I asked earlier, I was like, I wish there was a standard around ads. Does this mean that you're going to begin to institute some sort of ethical version of advertising? Like these are things you could do in terms of how you advertise? Like is what you're doing simply a conduit

or are you saying this is how we prefer to deliver ads to users? Meaning, I mean, I don't even know how to really say it. I guess the tracking isn't there, right? So that's one thing, but you do get the attention. So you're just essentially tracking an anonymized attention. Yep, exactly. And that's not just limited to Brave. We plan to have it in lots of different products. Brave is just the first one.

Gotcha. So I'm back on the advertiser thing. Sorry, Adam and I are on different channels a little bit here. But let's say I only want to advertise to hackers. I don't care. You should be into AI if you're going to see my practical AI ad. Now we can't do that, right? Because you've been anonymizing, you've been anonymizing you've been privatizing i can't potentially or you can't do that yep you definitely can um so the way that that works is that every client if they opt into the ads they're then downloading the entire ad catalog and locally figuring out which ads to show um on your device so um if you look at what does the browser know the browser knows even more than google knows for, because you spend all your time in the browser and different websites, and it knows everything about you, really. Gotcha. We can do very targeted advertising

without telling ourselves anything, really. This is basically the same model that Apple is using with iOS with regards to its intelligence, is you put all of the intelligence, even the machine learning things, into the device, which has all the information. It doesn't have to go back to

Apple to get that done. Whereas on Android's side, a lot of the smarts is in the cloud. It's in Google's servers. And so there's round trips for these things. And Google's hypothesis or their statement is that their supposition is that they can do better smarter things uh server side than you can do on a device and apple's is the opposite that you can you can do just as well and then also have the privacy.

And so a similar model here where you're saying we can do all of the smart things that you could do with an ad platform. It's just that the platform is inside the browser. Like it's all the smarts are right in there and therefore they're only known by that browser and therefore siloed to your device. Yeah. And as an advertiser, you can select all the different segments that you're interested in as well when you're uploading your creatives so pretty cool yeah so bat so we

have a cryptocurrency and one of the the gift and the curse of cryptos is right the price goes up and down a bunch um no doubt that's probably had some implications on your runway, on your ability to pay yourselves. I know you raised initially from China, but you had a big ICO. And that 36 million, I think you said that you sold in 20 seconds, probably looked like maybe 360 million for a while there back in December.

And now it might not look like so hot. Is that something that volatility of the bat price uh something that has come into play at a practical level for brave inc or for the browser or is it really something that doesn't matter all that much you just kind of assume eventually it's going to hold some sort of value um so the way that like ico's work is basically um i guess for for an ico funding when i say 36 million it's not 36 million in bat that we have it's 36 million that people used in ethereum to buy bat with um so at that point um we're not speculators so most of this is converted to um um usd in fiat

to run the company um gotcha so you sold it you sold almost immediately after the ico i mean not all that we still have some youth as well but yeah we sold a very good position well that was smart okay so that doesn't affect the company but what about the the the volatility around the token itself so as a publisher as an advertiser, as an end user, you know, you give me one bat today, it might be worth half of what it is tomorrow, it'd be worth 4x. Is this the kind of market where if you have publishers who are saying, man, maybe we could make a living on as a brave publisher, but that living might be volatile?

The volatility is definitely not that big. There's definitely not like an overnight 4x type thing that's happening. So it's a lot less than that. But I think over time, especially as we launch ads later later this year, I think it'll stabilize more and more. And over time, like everything was against Bitcoin pairings like on exchanges originally and more and more different exchanges are creating pairs for USD.d so so at that point you become a little more a little more independent from the bitcoin swings from the bitcoin price yeah so one of the i alluded to coinbase you know being in on it i was joking i wasn't alluding to

insider trading or anything but i was saying that coinbase uh people know what to do with regard to icos they get it because they're inside that world but related to that is that you guys have recently been listed on coinbase with a usd i think it's their their tether their usd token which yeah which isn't exactly you know it's not it's not your dollars but it's tied to your dollars so it's it feels like your dollars um yeah it's like i don't know about it. I'm pretty sure it's just a stable coin. So it's tied to one USD, I think. Exactly.

But so it's close enough where you don't have to go from USD to Ether to BAT or from USD to Bitcoin to BAT. You can go from USD pretty much directly to BAT and that will hypothetically remove the price volatility from bat away from Bitcoins, away from Ethereum's, assuming a certain amount of transactions and liquidity over time. What I find interesting here, though, is that the confidence in the verified publishers is tied to something that is certainly, you know, insider baseball kind of speak, you know, like even there, you know, it was very difficult to explain. Like, so you're trying to get someone's confidence to trust one, a new browser. And I'm sure that this is a known hill mountain hurdle, however you want to describe it. but i guess what i'm trying to get at is like you know the bad rap or the reputation so to speak of crypto markets at large as they're

talked about on cnn money or other you know cnbc money or all these different you know bloomberg whatever like there's some sort of like up and down of that market and there's some sort of like lack of awareness to the general public and is that impact clearly it does it impacts brave right but i mean to be a publisher and to be say an ad publisher or whatever you have to have some confidence in the thing and when that confidence is constantly waning because of the crypto markets which is just kind of a weird market generally and a lot of insiders speak it's just hard to put the confidence in yeah i guess like from a publisher perspective it's it's kind of an easy buy just because we do allow the money to flow to these publishers that aren't signed up yet um so it's it's like for some of our bigger publishers are already getting uh four figure uh payments um so it's it's not that hard of a sell to say like you have

something thousand dollars waiting for you go collect it um yeah it becomes a little bit easier at that point when you're kind of i hate when people say that to me yeah yeah more thousands of dollars darn it i mean the other thing to put in there and i agree that there's a there's either like a fomo or a jomo which is the joy of missing out there's a stigma on the crypto markets depending on whether they're bulls or bears and so we're in a major bear market and so it's like oh that thing but just like the brave team didn't need to speculate right right? Like they ICO'd, they got a bunch of ether and then they sold that ether immediately, most of it for cash,

for fiat money. You can do the same thing as a Brave publisher. Like every time bat comes into your account, whether it's worth two cents or two bucks, you can just take the two cents or two bucks today. You don't have to ride the wave. Gotcha. And because it's opt-in, but they're already collecting them for you. Like Brian says, you get an email, Hey, you've got all these,

you've got all this money come and get it. That's pretty easy. So that's what the awareness needs to be then. I mean, because you know, here I am sitting here thinking not so much just about us in particular, because I get it, but I'm thinking about all the people

who don't that don't even take that first step to get the confidence because they're like well i'm stuck in bad or whatever like that's the awareness that needs to drive it home is like you're not stuck in this you know just this uh this currency that you're totally unaware of you know i just think back to the seth um seth meyer's skit of like cryptocurrency was around the 20 000 mark for bitcoin holiday time frame just after i think maybe in the new year where they get on it to me it's hilarious but like that's what the mainstream people think and you know when you try to get past a hurdle of like, okay, here, technological people like Jared and I and our listeners have accepted Brave to some degree or are willing to try Brave to some degree. We're the ones you get easier and earlier, whereas the mainstreamers will be like, still don't get it not trying it you know the awareness needs to be around that stigma of like you're stuck to hey it's just a conduit of so that we can have a digital currency on the internet that transfers easy and you can easily do it so your explanation

jared should be like you know written down and on and put on repeat put on loop so to speak yeah thank you we have the technology we can loop we, we can loop such things. That's right. That's right. And I'm sure the brave team has a marketing folks and, and people who are interested in, you know, helping educate the general public of these things. It's nice that it's a, it's,

it comes along for the ride. Like the, the primary sell for sell for brave as an end user is your privacy, your security and your speed, you know, a good browser where you're not the product is their pitch on the homepage. It's not bat and, and, and, you know, the attention economy, right? That's kind of the inside baseball that you find yourself into. And it's, it's somewhat a nice

viral marketing scheme from a publisher's perspective, because now you have people giving publishers money all of a sudden, Hey, here's a publisher that's aware of it. Well, what do publishers do? They publish stuff. So they're going to write about it if they're getting some sort of payments from people browsing their websites using this browser. Let me ask this question. Let's say I'm the New Yorker or someone who has a subscription. Is my choice, tell me if this is the level it's at. Do I choose to have my own subscription model?

Or do I choose to say use because BAT is going to be so influential? Maybe not today, but sometime in the future. Do I subscribe for a buck to get a week free of the New Yorker and go direct? Or do I just choose a different, better, however you want to air quote it, browser like Brave because of bat and attention tokens with bat? Is that the New Yorker or someone like them, just to use an example of like a publisher who has their own subscription model, they trade theirs in for the idea and future of Brave and Bat,

or just to say Bat in general, since this is the implementation, it's at the Brave level at this point for attention. Yeah, so like a good comparison of that would be, we partnered with the Dow Jones Media Group and they have a paid subscription and paid newsletter. And they would, as part of this deal, they would advertise Brave on their site

and they would get that in return. But if you downloaded it from their site, you would then get a free subscription to their premium content as well. So yeah, so we're definitely open to things like that where it kind of gives you an in to this premium content. Yeah.

So you mentioned bringing back to other products beyond Brave. What are some ideas are you thinking about podcasting that's where i'm trying to get with this bringing them yeah now podcast is a great great way uh a great alternate product but i think like it's going to probably be exposed via an sdk um the sdk is already in progress it's just we're the first user of the sdk and how do we come to the beta i beta? I can't even imagine. Well, I'll say we've had lots of, we've had lots,

it might be a stretch. We've had a few emails from people who are saying, you know how Brave is great for browsing and written publishers? What if there was a podcast app that could do

what Brave is doing with BAT? And most of my response is, podcast apps are really hard to make. So make sure you actually want to build a good podcast app first and then think about the economy around it as similar way you're doing brave. Like building a good browser is really hard. I'm sure Brian, as you know. And so that's what I usually tell the people is like, just maybe partner with an existing podcast app that's already has a user base. So point is that people are thinking about these things.

It's interesting that you're saying, okay, here's an SDK for Brave Payments and BAT where you can build it into your own things. There's a lot of companies that we're already in talks with and that want to adopt it. It's more just we need to get everything

deployed first and working and proven and then bring in those other platforms as well. I think what's interesting here is we start off the conversation talking about Brave and the mountain it needs to climb and thrive if given the option to a world where there's a brand new product called BAT that may have been previously already known, like at the inception of Brave to some degree, but maybe I missed it or Brian, you could shed light. But, you know, sometimes you do one thing to get to the next thing that actually is your home

run. And it seems like, you know, Brave is just a browser, not to say it's that actually is your home run and it seems like you know brave is just a browser not to say it's just a browser on a bad way but like how rude it doesn't have the same kind of legs that bat does by being in multiple other products offering license opportunities partnership opportunities like it's a transient where it can go anywhere product for brave ink you know was was bat always an idea or was it always brave and then you just stumbled on bat no it was originally it was brave um and we used bitcoin as the back end so um before bat even was a thing um everything was already built out on bitcoin so that was part of the the value prop was that we already have the system that that was proven with bitcoin and we can just uh use that instead um now this was we did that back when

the transaction fees for bitcoin were insanely high like you'd have to uh yeah yeah it just wasn't working very well it makes sense for microments when the transaction fees are huge, right? Exactly. Yeah. And also we couldn't find anyone to give us several hundred million dollars in Bitcoin to give out to users for free. They grow our user base. So that was part of it as well. So you got the big 1.0 coming up with the new Chromium front end. If you go to brave.com right now, you can download a version that is the new Brave browser. It's not 1.0 yet, but it has the Chromium front end if you go to brave.com right now you can download a version that is the new brave browser it's not 1.0 yet but it has the chromium front end i've checked it the emoji picker works beautifully you're going to get your chrome extensions in there you're going to get

your native google or not google you're going to get your chrome dev tools in there you also have the ad platform upcoming give the folks I know people like to pin down, especially cryptocurrency-based projects with ship dates and these kind of things, but just a general idea of when is 1.0 coming, when is Brave, not Brave Payments, Brave Advertising coming? What is just the general timeframe for these things that people can expect to see them and try them out? So 1.0

we're probably looking around february um ads before the end of the year um ads first yep what's holding back 1.0 since you've got the big rewrite in there are there additional features or getting ads integrated well there's multiple platforms um so we want to basically have the whole system running um we want to have it not only running on desktop, but also on mobile, for example, as well. But really, a 1.0 event is kind of like a big marketing deal. So you'll be compared head to head against everything. We want to make sure that you only get one chance, I guess, to do one of those 1.0s.

So we want to make sure we have everything in place for that. So, Brian, we're at this point where it's time to let you go. But is there anything that's been on your mind during this conversation that you're like, man, I wish you'd asked me this question or just one final piece of advice? I was thinking earlier, you're talking about the stability of cryptocurrencies. And I think like in the past month, Bitcoin's actually been more stable than like the S&P 500. And also another thought that I was having was that like mass adoption in crypto is not just going to come from people going to buy the cryptocurrency. I think it was the CEO, Brian, from Coinbase that said people won't buy their first crypto

they'll earn it. So I really think that that is kind of the perfect platform for that. I'm with you on the earning part of it. Buying is a weird play. Earn it somehow and go from there. Exactly. Brian, thanks for your time, man. We appreciate you being a man on this mission and a team on this mission

to help a better web be more safer, more secure, and then potentially publish like us, finding new ways to generate, you know, sustainable revenue from the attention our users and or listeners desire to give us in ways that just make sense for the future of the way the web works. So thanks so much for your hard work and for sharing your time with us today. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me on.

Thank you for tuning in today. We love that you listen to the show. If enjoy the show do us a favor go into itunes or apple podcasts and leave us a rating or review either is appreciated you can go into overcast that's where you listen and favorite it tweet a link to it share with a friend and of course i want to thank our awesome sponsors and partners rollbar digital ocean algolia and go cd also thanks to fastly our bandwidth partner head to fastly.com to learn more and we're able to move fast and fix things here at changelog because of rollbar check them out at robor.com and we're hosted on linode cloud servers check them out at linode.com slash changelog this episode was hosted by me and jared editing was by tim smith music is

by breakmaster cylinder super awesome music i hope you love it and if you want to hear more episodes like this subscribe to our master feed at changelog.com slash master or go into your podcast app and search for changelog master. You'll find it. Subscribe. Get all of our shows as well as some extras that only hit the master feed. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. I'm Nick Nisi.

This is K-Ball. And I'm Rachel White. We're panelists on JS Party, a community celebration of JavaScript and the web. Every Thursday at noon central, a few of us get together and chat about JavaScript, Node, and topics ranging from practical accessibility to weird web APIs. You could just eval the text that you're given

and I think that's basically what it's doing. What could go wrong? Yeah, exactly. This is not legal advice to eval text as it comes in. Join us live on Thursdays at noon central. Listen and Slack with us in real time or wait for the recording to hit. New episodes come out each Friday.

Find the show at changelog.com slash jsparty or wherever you listen to podcasts.