something unusually happened last month when one of my blog posts got on the orange website etc: i made twenty bucks (1/5)

this is from @brave, denominated in BAT, which is a kind of Ethereum. i wanted to write a post about how this all works but it's really opaque: i don't know how many people or how many pageviews added up to this number (macwright.org is fully tracker-free)

i read through the BAT whitepaper to understand where money is entering and how it moves around. my best guess is that this is folks who get bat as part of the "user growth pool" and are mostly automatically giving it to my site because i set it up in the publisher program

brave is a legitimate company, so their crypto-asset flow is pretty formal: funds go to an @upholdinc wallet, which i put into @coinbase and turn into Actual Money I Can Spend On Beer. uphold & coinbase both follow KYC so you have to show them your drivers license etc.

brave is a really interesting experiment and receiving money is cool! alas, it's very opaque and confusing in terms of why i received such money, from who, or who they got it from. feels a bit promotional at this stage. but, hey, a way for ad-free sites to pay the bills? cool.