Blockchain Bubble or Revolution: The Present and Future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies

by Neel Mehta

It remains to be seen whether BAT will achieve mass popularity, but its vision for a new business model for the web makes a lot of sense. Currently, the incentives are all misaligned: advertisers are incentivized to make advertising as intrusive and annoying as possible, publishers are incentivized to cram ever-more ads on the page, and consumers are incentivized to install adblockers because they get nothing but misery from ads. You only have to look at the absurd ad-blocking arms race to see how broken the system is: first there were adblockers, then websites started installing tools to hide web pages from people who were using adblockers,[499] and now there are add-ons for adblockers that stop websites from using that tactic.[500] First adblockers, then adblocker killers, then adblocker killer killers.[ss] But BAT seems able to align the incentives properly: everyone benefits when a user views an ad, and everyone loses when ads make a website experience bad. Under this theory, users won’t want to install adblockers (who would pass up free money?), advertisers will make ads that people actually like,[tt] and publishers won’t make websites that are so ad-filled that users leave. It might just work.

BATs are Ethereum ERC-20 tokens.