We are Brian Bondy (co-founder and CTO of the Brave privacy browser), and Dietrich Ayala (IPFS Lead) to discuss the decentralized web and the new IPFS integration in Brave

For those who would rather use a minimalist browser, is it possible to get a version of Brave (Brave Lite if you want) that has core functionality only? Keep the ad and tracker blocking in, but forego the BAT, Crypto, VPN, sponsored images etc etc. I know you guys need to make money but it’s honestly starting to feel a bit like Brave is heading in the same way as other browsers have done - bloated. Just an opinion of course, I still love the product!

We try to build everything in a way that's configurable. For example for this IPFS feature you can completely strip it away in brave://flags

We're happy to consider it a bug for any major aspect that you can't disable.

Performance and user privacy is paramount. If something is affecting either of those, it won't be shipped.

Damn. That's a really well worded non answer. Love it.

Exactly.

Are there flags for all those mentioned?

Most of those things are opt in. Sponsored images is opt out. Since when things are off they use no resources, we aren't doing a Brave Lite. However there's also build flags for these things, so you could build with them off if you wanted to.

[deleted]

Unlike a lot of companies, we design features in a way that we don't have access to user data. So it's not like other companies that say we won't use your data, "trust us". For us, we just don't have access at all.

For the referral FUD, see here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25842165

We're transparent in everything we do, we're open sourced and auditable too. See http://github.com/brave.

If Brave isn't for someone, that's cool, we like other browsers too. We're here to serve the Brave users first and foremost though.

Found Brave a few months ago and just wanted to thank you. Between native crypto, VPN, and now IPFS integration, it’s much more than just a browser. You’re seriously saving people who don’t even realize they’re victims.

What led you to decide to create a new browser? Have you had any legal pushback? Anything I can do to help as a consumer?

Thanks, some other cool things we have is Tor support and WebTorrent support as well.

Browsers have continued innovating but have been stagnant in a lot of ways. Several browsers have been saying they'd add Tor and IPFS support for years, but they just haven't done it yet.

Brave is by far the most private and innovative browser that is built off of Chromium. Chromium is great, but I don't want to sign into my browser and have my data sync'ed to Google's servers.

I don't want to be tracked across the internet, and I enjoy being paid for my attention for opt-in user private ads. So that's why we have Brave.

No we haven't had any legal pushback.

Isn't using chromium a privacy liability though?

No, we deviate significantly from Chromium in areas that involve user privacy and for things that call out to Google's server. See here for more information:

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove))

Also see here for a lot of ways that we're innovating in the user privacy area:
http://brave.com/blog

https://twitter.com/pes10k and his team are leading a lot of great work in this area.

Oh, that's interesting! That was actually the main reason I didn't look any further into Brave and I now realize I've just been lazy. Thank you for your answer! I'll check out your links :)

Enjoy! Btw our Sync is pretty awesome too and works cross platform.
Hat tip to https://twitter.com/yrliou https://twitter.com/anthonnytseng and Alexey from Brave.

Client side encrypted data with keys that never leave your computer. You can transfer them via a QR code or BIP39 keywords.

See here for more information: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove))

This link is redirecting to https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki for me

Works for me, make sure if you're copying and pasting to get the full URL including parentheses.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove)

Man this reads like an ad for Brave. It’s way too perfect for an “AMA”.

We'll turn down the quality for the next one :P

How concerned are you about data manipulation on the internet? [Other browser] not just filtering but removing things from the index to control what people can see.

What can we as citizens do to prevent this and protect free data sharing?

I think it's a valid concern for many things, not so much a concern for other things.

But that's the nice thing about IPFS, you know that the URI you're loading is the immutable data that was first put there.

With Brave having the ability to host and manage a local node, you can be certain your local node is verifying the content correctly before it is served to you.

1. Are there legal risks of being an IPFS node in Brave? IIUC that means I might be treated as "seeder" of a file if it's copyrighted etc?
2. How does IPFS deal with bad actors hosting (and thus making trivially easily publicly accessible) illegal/harmful content? Doing nothing might lead to crackdowns from the regulators.

Thanks for fantastic work!

Re 1. If you're using a local node for IPFS option in Brave, then content that you access can be served from your node afterwards. We outlined this here: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051406452-How-does-IPFS-Impact-my-Privacy- and mention it before the user picks to use a local node.

Re 2. I see this working in a way similar to our our adblocking works in Brave. In the future you could subscribe to different blocking lists that you'd like and we'd default some on but allow you to pick.

How does your company make money?

We have user private ads that users can opt into. If they do they get paid for their share of attention. We also have sponsored background images on the new tab page which can be turned off

What are some of your favorite dApps or websites that currently take advantage of the Brave browser's integration of IPFS?

I think Origin Protocol is pretty cool. We've used them for our Brave swag store. They basically create a site on IPFS with some smart contracts that has no server side component.

https://www.originprotocol.com/en

You can read more about that here:
https://brave.com/swag-store-update/

I was an early user of Crypto Kitties even before they launched and I met the team at ETHWaterloo. My wife even used them to buy virtual kitties. Kudos to them for getting so widespread.

Hi Brian,

I love Brave's mobile browser and have been using it for a year! However, was not a fan of Brave's desktop browser, when I tried it a year ago.

Why should I switch from Firefox with Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, and containers?

Extensions can't save you from these types of problems in Chrome, but Brave can: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove))

You mentioned Firefox though. I like Firefox, I worked for Mozilla for a long time. I think they're beholden to their search partner though.

We're innovating in privacy in many ways that Firefox hasn't gotten to yet.

Do a search for "What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately?" https:/twitter.com/pes10k has been doing a great job blogging about some of these efforts.

You should try giving Brave desktop another chance. Sync is pretty great with desktop and mobile and you might have tried it a long time ago before we did a rewrite that made everything work much better. https://brave.com/download

Will BAT be taking advantage of IPFS capabilities in any way? I see smart contracts can be programmed to use IPFS and filecoin for storage and such. I'm curious as to what partnerships or capabilities/features may arise out of this integration.

Regarding BAT And IPFS, I was thinking of at least 3 opportunities for integration.
If a website is opened via DNSLink (which we'll support later this year) then we can already use their domain info to allow tips to that creator's content.

It'd also be neat to allow the creators site to "prove" they own certain IPNS content using their libp2p-key. They would basically add content they own and prove they own it in the creators portal. They could later collect tips that way.

Another idea is relating to the publishing of content while browsing the web. We could allow users to pin any content that they’re browsing to another IPFS node and to pay using BAT for that pinning. This could be done both with virtual BAT before it is withdrawn to an exchange, or with user wallet funds inside Brave’s Crypto Wallets, or using another Ethereum remote client like Metamask.

We’re also exploring ideas relating to decentralized extension installation and NFTs, and possibly as an alternate option for ENS resolution.

I'd love to hear other ideas if people have them too!

As someone starting out learning about blockchain and related development, what paths or free courses would you advise for the best chance at success? Currently working through Odin Project and have years of html/css/php, mostly WordPress and all self-taught.

Ivan on Tech has some good courses relating to blockchain. Some books like Mastering Bitcoin or Mastering Ethereum by Andreas Antonopoulos are good to understand a lot of concepts at a fundamental level too. Reading whitepapers is usually productive. There are tons of resources online, but the most important part for developers is just to jump in and get your hands dirty with a personal project.

Would this browser be good for someone who doesnt really know a lot about privacy/ crypto and currently uses, say, Firefox?

See this answer to a similar question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/l2tvx1/we_are_brian_bondy_cofounder_and_cto_of_the_brave/gk89tvi/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Thanks for posting!

Hey! I'm a huge fan of Brave and BAT, and I'm a developer so I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I haven't really looked into IPFS too much so I'm not sure I fully understand what this integration with Brave means or how it works.

Could you describe in your own words (and ideally in layman's terms) what IPFS is, and what this integration means and why it's important? :)

Check this answer which was for a similar question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/l2tvx1/we_are_brian_bondy_cofounder_and_cto_of_the_brave/gk8hio7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

How is IPFS different from torrents? As a layman, why should I be interested in this?

I don't believe different torrents share swarms, but IPFS has a global DHT and network. We do have support for WebTorrent as well built in.

Mainly we just want to make sure that we can provide the content users want to access in Brave.

How is Peter Thiel currently involved with Brave?

Peter Thiel is not personally an investor in Brave. The firm he's a partner in (Founders Fund) has a small seed series investment, which was led by Cyan Banister. Some first floor engineers at Brave have more equity than that small investment constitutes.

Hi /u/bbondy and u/autonome, here are some more questions from BATProject members:

1. /u/ItGonBeK: Is there a wiki or similar of all IPFS pages?
2. /u/zopyrus2: How private is ipfs? Or is it more useful/secure than torrent? Captain?

/u/zopyrus2 asks: How private is ipfs? Or is it more useful/secure than torrent? Captain?

We have a good overview of the privacy differences in IPFS here:

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051406452-How-does-IPFS-Impact-my-Privacy-

Longer term we’d like to have IPFS work using a Tor transport.

/u/ItGonBeK asks: Is there a wiki or similar of all IPFS pages?

Not that I know of, but you can find some IPFS URIs by searching Google. You can also publish your own content and then share links that way.

Here's a Brave logo if you want to try loading it in Brave!

ipfs://bafybeifk6th5qhox7pffjqjerbjxkpmsmufdcswdgacnmyv3fn53z2wgwe

Funny thing that some sites don't allow links yet because they don't see it as a valid URI. But if you use a href and link to an IPFS URI, it'll work in Brave when you click it.

Sounds like Pied Piper. Who is your favorite Silicon Valley character and why?

That's basically how I explained this feature to my wife, remember when we watched Silicon Valley? Well what they were working on at the end is what we just released support for.

My favorite would have to be Jian Yang for his hotdog identifying app.

When will I get to withdraw my BAT without an uphold account?

Support for more custodians is coming. Stay tuned.

I tried Brave and went back to chrome for a simple reason: your browser does *not* support the translate functionality (appears in chrome by right clicking the mouse), and it is my understanding you have been avoiding to implement this for a long time. Is there a reason for this? Will you eventually do it? It is really important

We currently detect if your browser is configured as a different language than the page you're viewing, and we suggest to install the Google Translate extension. I agree this is not ideal though.

We did have this feature working a while ago and we basically implemented our own translation service with a back-end that was configurable but using Microsoft Translate.

The problem is that it's very expensive at this time though. We'll revisit it eventually for sure. Possibly we could even tie this to user earned BAT that some users just have sitting around.

The work we did previously is here if you'd like to take a look

https://github.com/brave/go-translate

It worked on par with how Chrome does translations.

Will the Google Translate extension compromise my privacy if I install it?

Possibly for text you translate

Hi, My name is Mike Toutonghi, Development Lead for The Verus Project. We have an IPFS supporting identity system, VerusID, a model for mapping friendly URLs to ID-based IPFS content, and I think an integration/Brave extension to enable support for these friendly, ID-based URLs which can leverage the Brave IPFS support would be very powerful. We have a worldwide, no-ICO network with many thousands of community members and even more users. Who might I connect with to discuss the best way to integrate?

Thanks. Feel free to hit me up at brian @ brave

IPFS seems to be pretty slow, probably due to lack of nodes I'm guessing?

What's the best way to help with this issue?
Any improvements planned to help alleviate speed and increase appeal of being a node?

Pretty speedy for me, also you can hit nodes that are geographically distributed closer to you. If you access content that is not readily available though it can be slower. You can pin content to your node to make it always available or use a service like https://pinata.cloud/

IPFS technical question

Are there any good projects or thoughts on how to host something like GIT or a read/write WIKI on IPFS since these endpoints are by nature non-static? Wouldn't the constant changing of content force a rehash making the endpoint unknowable?

Is there work underway that may allow stuff like PUT, POST, PATCH and the like to IPFS, or can this all just be done with IPNS + magic?

Checkout https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/host-git-style-repo/

Opinion/stance on GitHub?

Brave uses Github for pretty much all of its projects. They provide a good service.

Will Brave or BAT be doing anything with partnerships, browser or coin utility involving eSports, fantasy sports, poker or any other kind of gaming online?

See here https://brave.com/brave-and-gala-games/ for gaming online, more to come in the future. NFTs are of interest too.

Hi! Thanks for your AMA! I'd like to ask you, is IPFS really private and/or anonymous? I've been following their Github for some time in past: back then they refused to implement private mode and Tor support. Does your IPFS implementation leak local network info to the swarm?

There's definitely a different privacy model to be aware of. We highlight that here and when the user chooses to install a local node or Gateway: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051406452-How-does-IPFS-Impact-my-Privacy-

I also get into it more here:
https://brianbondy.com/blog/177/ipfs-support-in-brave

We'd like to adopt Tor transport in the future for when a user is using a local node.

For Tor windows in Brave, we currently don't allow ipfs: and ipns:

For private windows, we currently disable it, but we're discussing how best to accomplish that here:

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/13613

Will I be able to add ipfs:// and ipns:// origins to my API service's CORS configuration and have brave respect them?

Yes

I joined brave over the privacy aspect, how would you explain IPFS to a total newbie?

Today's web is expensive for publishers, it's lossy, unversioned, centralized and easily censored. URLs contain mutable data which isn’t ideal for the future of blockchains and oracles. IPFS gives users a new way to solve these problems and Brave allows you to load content now that uses IPFS.

Bert bondy?

Sorry only Brian Bondy here. I'm sure Bert is a great guy though!

I've been using brave for a while now after giving up on chrome, though I gotta admit a lot of the specifics of this ama are above me. My only question is will Brave ever get the same 'Press Tab to search a website' from the address bar like native chrome has? That's really my only complaint about the browser, that sometimes I have to make I have to make 2 extra clicks, so you must be doing something right

I think you're looking for command+L on macOS or Ctrl+L on Windows/Linux!

When browsing using the Tor function, is security optimal?

This page does a better job than I would at explaining the benefits of using Tor:

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018121491-What-is-a-Private-Window-with-Tor-Connectivity-

It's definitely a slower browsing experience, so it's not for everyone or for every case.

What is your favorite bat/brave meme?

Oh there's a lot of good ones, I don't want to share, but I get a good laugh at the ones involving Brendan Eich.

What is the most exciting thing to you both about Brave?

Since the start it's been the ambition of Brave for me. Our culture is centered around being a user's agent and we are not afraid to innovate for the the user's benefit.

We can innovate in a way that’s not beholden or influenced by a major search engine. The opt-in ads system gives Brave a way to get revenue to maintain itself in a way that many browsers can't.

The decentralization of web content seems to place a lot of faith in the ability of participants to provide always online access to their storage and not modify the contents while it is there. How do you plan to prevent that?

Well they can change the content, but it would be at a different URI. Not all content will move to IPFS, it's for different use cases than HTTPS. So mainly it can co-exist and we don't need to put all our faith in a single protocol.

I am a Firefox fan. Is there a reason why Brave (and other Chromium clones) build off Chrome and not Firefox?

Webcompat is one of the biggest reasons. I'd say this is why Edge is now based on Chromium too. Having a lot of experience in both codebases, I feel like Chromium's code is cleaner and more modern too.

Along the same lines as the original question, what can Firefox do (practically) to attract more development like Chromium? I feel code quality and web compatibility will come eventually but it could be a chicken and an egg problem with not enough developers opting for it and the browser not improving quickly enough.

Mozilla is in a bad spot with declining market share, and the best of their leadership (Brendan, Gal, etc) have left.

What are each of your favourite sandwiches?

PB&J

Top 10, not in order of preference, but unconscious bias might out me.

• One very particular bahn mi I had in Vietnam
• Shrimp po-boys in NOLA
• A proper kati roll
• Katz's reuben
• There used to be a place in Seattle called Paseo in Fremont neighborhood which had a Caribbean grilled prawn sandwich that was amazing
• In Yunnan province of China, there's an ethnic group called the Naxi that make a rad flatbread, cheese and pepper sandwich, just DDG "naxi sandwich"
• Most fried egg sandwiches

Gah, ok that's not ten but I should answer some other questions.

I think you misspelt PB&J

Are there any plans now, or technologies in the future that would allow something at the scale of Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube to exist in the dweb space? Could either of you share your vision of returning to the "wild-west" of the internet of old?

Checkout Mastodon - https://joinmastodon.org/

I don't use it though so I don't know a lot about it.

What tokens will run IPFS? I know of BAT and Filecoin but any other partnerships in the works?

IPFS runs independent of Filecoin and does not require it. They are complementary protocols. But Filecoin nodes are IPFS nodes under the hood.

We have some great IPFS work coming up in Brave and we're even exploring opportunities for BAT and Filecoin.

Question from /u/david-song: How long before this is in the Android browser? /u/bbondy

I was just starting to build Brave w/ IPFS flags turned on in Android yesterday. We’ll offer a public gateway option first and then later on work on a local node option.

I'm a fan of the browser! What hardships did you all face when you all first introduced Brave?

I have a blog post on this topic here:
https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10

It involved a lot of rewrites and restarts until we found the right path forward.

I am a mediocre developer. how can I be more like you?

/me looks over his shoulder

me? I just work really hard, non-stop, for over 25-years.

More practically, just do personal projects or paid projects, dive in. Don't just read about things, do things. Work with others that are better than you in some aspects. Most people are better than me in some aspects.

Some more questions for /u/bbondy and /u/autonome from BAT/Brave fans:

1. /u/VirtualPartyCenter: I would love to download and host a full node from my home to help the strength of the network. Although it just seems that I have to first visit the sites before they will become a part of the data I will share. Unless I’m reading this incorrectly, how can I just choose to download and share the entirety of the ipfs platform so they it strengthens the network as a whole? Data storage isn’t a question as I have plenty.
2. /u/utilitycoder: Sounds cool. If you run a local node does that mean you have unknown content on your machine and are serving to others? If so, what protections are in place to not host bad (illegal) content?
3. u/mighty3xodus: Amazing tech! Amazing team! What if there aren't any active nodes which have a particular data pinned? Will the recipient have to wait until the "host" node comes back on the network to seed the data?
4. /u/mighty3xodus: Is the data shared encrypted on the active nodes or is it stored as an ipfs object with the cid and corresponding data?
5. /u/ItGonBeK: I see the companion extension requires read/write perms on all websites visited, what steps are taken to ensure Brave users privacy?

1. /u/ItGonBeK
   

: I see the companion extension requires read/write perms on all websites visited, what steps are taken to ensure Brave users privacy?

IPFS Companion is an optional extension that you can use for finer grained control of your node. We have a lot of overlapping functionality built in already in Brave, and we'll continue to do so. There's no need to install IPFS Companion, but if you'd like to, that's cool too! This extension has access to some special IPFS APIs that help the extension integrate with Brave better.

1. /u/utilitycoder
   

: Sounds cool. If you run a local node does that mean you have unknown content on your machine and are serving to others? If so, what protections are in place to not host bad (illegal) content?

Just content that your node requests will be available on your node. There is no content distribution if you haven’t explicitly requested the content. We have configured things so that the node will garbage collect its content after 1GB of usage. You can also clear cache to get rid of content. Your node also won’t participate in DHT metadata distribution (i.e. managing which nodes have which content). There’s not currently a setting for a deny list for CIDs, but I hear that might be on the roadmap for 2021.

I imagine bad content would work similar to how lists like EasyList and EasyPrivacy works today. These lists power a lot of adblockers and tracking blockers out there. They use ABP filter syntax. If it’s implemented like that, you could turn on other lists to block like you can with about:adblock in Brave now. These lists would have to work a little bit differently in that we probably wouldn’t want to distribute the CIDs of bad content themselves, but we’d deliver a hash of the bad CIDs.

1. /u/VirtualPartyCenter
   

: I would love to download and host a full node from my home to help the strength of the network. Although it just seems that I have to first visit the sites before they will become a part of the data I will share. Unless I’m reading this incorrectly, how can I just choose to download and share the entirety of the ipfs platform so they it strengthens the network as a whole? Data storage isn’t a question as I have plenty.

If you have plenty of data storage I'd suggest checking out Filecoin.

Take a look at pinning content in IPFS, this will make your node retain things. You can also tweak the configuration of your IPFS to avoid things like garbage collection if that's how you want to set it up!

1. /u/mighty3xodus
   

: Is the data shared encrypted on the active nodes or is it stored as an ipfs object with the cid and corresponding data?

Data is not encrypted at rest after you request it, it’s just stored in a cache and that cache will clear itself after a while when the currently configured storage limit is reached of 1GB. You can clear your cache and that will do a garbage collection on demand too automatically.

1. u/mighty3xodus: Amazing tech! Amazing team! What if there aren't any active nodes which have a particular data pinned? Will the recipient have to wait until the "host" node comes back on the network to seed the data?

Thanks!

If the data can’t be found it’ll wait for a while to load until timing out. A request for the same content later might succeed.

Question from /u/jankfrank: How do each of you envision IPFS being utilized in the long-term? What's the fantasy in the back of your mind? /u/bbondy /u/autonome

I’d like to run my own local node using Brave on Mars.

More seriously, I’d like to make Brave’s adblock definitions, catalogs, extensions, etc. available on IPFS. I’d like for users to be able to easily re-publish, fork, and pin their own content on IPFS. I’d like to make it easy for users to prove ownership of published content using their libp2p key and be rewarded for that content using BAT.

More of an IPFS question—is there a best practice for mirroring a (static) site? Ie. I want to host a portfolio on, let’s say, cloudflare (since they support IPFS) and also have it reachable via IPFS, or even automatically redirect from http to IPFS if someone navigates to my site via Brave?

I realize it’s probably not the best to think of this in terms of the regular old internet, but I’m really interested in hosting content on both.

I'm not sure about the recommended way to mirror a site but we'd like to make this easy in Brave in the future.

You can of course use go-ipfs to add and pin content to your node.

I found this though:
https://steemit.com/ipfs/@berkes/mirror-files-from-the-web-to-ifps-with-wget-to-ipfs

It sounds like you might be interested in checking out DNSLink.

Question from /u/PodichiPadadobbu: What kind of content do you think will be stored in IPFS in say 5 years? Can you put something like scihub on it? /u/bbondy /u/autonome

All kinds of content is on IPFS just like all kinds of content is on HTTP(S).

Dapps themselves and data that Dapps need to reference are prime candidates to be hosted on IPFS.

Some content is just lost over time, IPFS can help preserve history on versions of published content as well as duplicating it across several nodes. Storage on an individual node is deduplicated so there’s no wasted space.

Companies can take advantage of IPFS for distributing their content. For example, Brave delivers adblock definition updates for which trackers to block, those could be delivered through IPFS taking advantage of the geo-distributed nature of IPFS and also saving bandwidth costs.

As an example of a difference between hosting something on HTTP and having it on IPFS. If YouTube one day decides that it doesn’t like cryptocurrency content, it can immediately make all of that content disappear. Not only would this hurt popular Cryptocurrency influencers, but it would deprive content which should be accessible to users that want to access the information. For content on IPFS, no one company can decide that.

You can put whatever you want on IPFS and your node will host it, but keep in mind that your node is hosting it, and that can be tied to you.

One method isn’t absolutely better than the other, but they have different sets of properties that have different benefits and use cases.

Some Brave-specific questions for Brian from BATProject members:

1. /u/Kingflares: Around late December, someone on your team mentioned that you has good news for the BAT token in 2021 as well as a roadmap. Can you specify either what is coming or when the news or roadmap is gonna drop
2. /u/Spotums asks: That's exciting, looking forward to get a bit more familiar with IPFS! I also spotted Ecosia as a default search engine option in the code for 1.19.x release, does that mean it's finally going to happen? Super excited! However, will this only be available in some countries?

/u/bbondy

/u/Kingflares: Around late December, someone on your team mentioned that you has good news for the BAT token in 2021 as well as a roadmap. Can you specify either what is coming or when the news or roadmap is gonna drop

It sounds like they may not have been ready to share some work that was in progress. There’s a lot of different ideas around using BAT including work in progress by various teams within Brave.

1. /u/Spotums asks: That's exciting, looking forward to get a bit more familiar with IPFS! I also spotted Ecosia as a default search engine option in the code for 1.19.x release, does that mean it's finally going to happen? Super excited! However, will this only be available in some countries?

It’s just another option, but you can use any engine already in settings thanks to the OpenSearch description format.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch

Question from /u/EfficientIdeal: As a non-techy person, what are the practical applications of this that can make the regular person (the plain jane internet users who don't change any settings on their browsers) go "wow"? /u/bbondy /u/autonome

You can load a lot more content, in particular content that begins with ipfs: and ipns: instead of only https: in Brave. You can access this content using other browsers with a lot of extra configuration and manual installations, but the experience won’t be as good, and let’s be honest, you probably won’t bother.

Does traffic on the Brave browser increase and decrease with the crypto market? I'm interested in how much more people are using it with all the attention Bitcoin has had recently with its price hike.

I'm not sure if there's a correlation, but we're increasing month over month in users significantly. Brendan Eich tweets out the numbers every month. See also https://brave.com/transparency/

When are you going to offer sync that isn't horribly, horribly broken with crippling consistency issues and with support for more than just bookmarks?

(I get that it's a hard problem to solve while retaining some user privacy, this isn't a dig, it's just true. I've been a diehard brave user for over a year now, I couldn't imagine switching away -- but the lack of decent sync still sucks.)

I'm guessing you were an old sync user. It was completely rewritten and the new one is awesome. iOS only does bookmarks right now but android and desktop does everything that Chrome sync does, except for you are the only one with the encryption key for our sync.