How the Brave + DuckDuckGo Combo may Change your Online Experience

Brave browser, backed by the BAT cryptocurrency, really improves the online surfing experience, protecting users from obtrusive tracking and ads, while helping content creators to easily receive rewards for their work.

Browsing data are worth money

Each one of us, as a web user, produces a great amount of data, just browsing the internet. It has been estimated that, by 2020, each user will produce 1,7 Mb data in one second. You can even calculate how much is your personal data worth, according to the Financial Times. We are giving away those precious data to the big data companies, every day, basically for free. They can use that info to generate customized ads, or even monitor and influence our opinions and political vote, serving customized news and contents through social media (see the Cambridge Analytica case).

How Brave helps users to protect their data

Brave uses the Brave Shields embedded technology to block all possible trackers and ads, stop malicious scripts and throw away unused cookies. With the defaults settings, is still possible to browse most of the websites without problems. It's still possible to customize the settings, or even to deactivate the shields when necessary. According to my personal tests, most of the websites were working fine with standard settings. Only Netflix had some problems and I just had to deactivate the "protections" to make it work seamlessly again. The desktop version (and soon the mobile version too) also has the special Tor tab, for a super-encrypted navigation.

Private window with Tor - Currently available only for the desktop version
Picture from the Brave Official Website

Setting Duckduckgo as the default search engine

An additional layer of privacy can be added, just setting Duckduckgo as default search engine for Brave. Duckduckgo is a search engine that doesn't track users, also avoiding to keep their search history. It is funded by users' donations, and just using it with Brave allows to send automatic BAT tokens to the search engine. What is really interesting is that you may also see slightly different search results (compared to the Google's ones), and probably you will get more "neutral" SERPs. The reason is that, unlike Google algorithm, Duckduckgo doesn't tailor its results based on user's surfing habits.

Desktop and Mobile app available

Brave has both the mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop app, without having to use the old browser extension for Chrome, like in the past. The mobile and desktop versions can be synchronized together, to use a unique account on multiple devices (even though the BATs earned on one device are not unified with those earned with the other, according to my tests). I tried both versions, and, being a iOS/MacOS user, I found them faster and more performing than the (infamous) Safari default.

Brave browser - Desktop and mobile versions
Image from the Brave Official Website

Watching Ads to earn BAT

Even if Brave blocks all possible ads from websites, it's still possible to voluntarily watch its own ads, to earn the BAT cryptocurrency. Those ads will not track the user's preferences and habits, and will be displayed outside from the usual navigation tabs. Users can opt-in to receive them, setting up their amount / frequency. "If you really want to see ads, at least take some reward for that!", that's what Brave developers are trying to tell us.

Content Creators Rewards

Content creators can receive auto-donations (or spontaneous donations) with their  website and with their Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, Github, Vimeo accounts. I currently wasn't able to set up rewards for this blog, being on the Blogger platform (the system seems to recognize only Wordpress websites, and offers a WP plugin). Soon other platforms and social media will be available.

Creators Rewards system, backed by BAT cryptocurrency
Picture from the Brave Official Website

Conclusions

Brave is quite a cool browser, and the use with Duckduckgo really improves the web browsing experience. It's also great to receive rewards, both for watching the ads and for contents creation, and BAT turns out to be a promising cryptocurrency, already listed on the main exchanges. Performance and usability are great, even when compared to the most popular alternatives, like Chrome or Firefox. I personally enjoy using it, both for the privacy and for the BAT earnings, and I recommend it to everyone. Download Brave with my referral code here!

Crowdmine it - fund causes without sending money

Have you ever dreamed to fund a cause without sending money via PayPal or credit card?
The solution comes from the Italian no-profit organization, Cultura Digitale. Two members of this organization developed a website that allows to contribute to causes just giving a share of own's CPU power, to mine Monero (XMR).

 The website is called Crowdmine.it and also gives rewards to the best donors!

How it works

The website uses a web miner, which is customizable (you can set the mining power from 1 to 4), and mines Monero cryptocurrency (XMR), which goes to the selected project.

Users receive Crowdmine Tokens, proportionally to the hashes they donated, and appear in the global leaderboard, and also in the specific leaderboard of the funded project.

The users on top of the leaderboard can receive rewards (digital downloads, gift cards, real life gifts), depending on what is made available by the single project. Also, users who globally donated more, get to the global leaderboard and can receive other rewards, given by the platform itself.

Crowdmine.it leaderboard - You can start accumulating tokens and get the change to win the future rewards

Can CPU mining be effective?

Compared to high-performance miners (ASICs, GPU rigs), PC miners using CPU produce a little amount of XMR (but also consume really less energy).

This means that, to effectively fund projects, a great number of contributors is needed.

The rewards system is used to create a virtuous competition among miners, and also to try to stimulate them to mine more, offering some prizes to the most generous ones.

A new approach to browser mining

Until now, many browser mining websites were just not transparent (using CPU mining power of the users without warning them), and often associated with frauds or malware. 

This time, mining happens only when user voluntarily starts it, and for ethical and constructive causes. Unfortunately, many antivirus software, firewalls and anti-malware are still triggered by this kind of technology, and need to be deactivated to allow the platform to properly work.

Some projects you can fund right now

The Blue Dream project: they built a hand-made wooden ship to monitor the plastic pollution in the seas worldwide. They're part of the Greenpeace's "Mayday SOS Plastic" project. You can help them to map all the troubled areas and to find plastic pollution all around the world.

Crowdmine platform: you can contribute to the further developing of the crowdmine platform. They need to feature more projects and improve the user base, to get more effective results.

The Hollow Circle rock band:  help to fund the recording of the band's new album, you may receive digital downloads of their old and new tracks!

You can get further info reading the Crowdmine Whitepaper and visiting the official website

Bitcoin rally and the end of the "avocado correlation" myth

On October 25th, Bitcoin value rocketed from 7,500$ to 10,000$ in 24 hours, which was a 40% price surge in a single day. This was a quite rare happening, even for Bitcoin, and similar performances only happened twice in its history, in 2010 and 2011, when BTC was worth respectively 0.40 and 5.65 USD.

Additionally, this unexpected rush took place while many crypto analysts were quite bearish on Bitcoin and already preparing for the next "crypto winter".

What are the reasons behind this rise?

Some claimed that it happened because of a statement by Cina's General Secretary Xi Jinping (as reported by Cointelegraph which translated the original news by Xinhua). Xi declared that Cina will "accelerate the development of blockchain", and, in less than one hour, the Bitcoin chart apparently responded to that with a price rise.

Binance Research on Twitter, on the other side, as reported by CCN, claimed that Bitcoin's price spike was due to Trump's trade war with Cina, and the tariff storm.
We should also consider the Bitcoin Futures on Bakkt and trading platforms, like Bitmex, allowing leverage trading on crypto, as potential influencing factors for this phenomenon.

I believe that such a massive market movement never happens for a single cause, but always depends on a mix of many different factors, and it's not so easy to attribute the correct "weight" to each of them.

How the Avocado correlation began, and how it ended

The side effect of this spike is to finally disproof the "avocado correlation" theory. According to this, the avocado price was showing an unusual correlation with BTC (see twitter post below form Tracy Alloway @ Bloomberg).

*BITCOIN DROPS TO LOWEST LEVEL SINCE JUNE

The avocados told me this would happen. pic.twitter.com/5rOyE3Ohak

— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) October 24, 2019

Fortunately, after the recent BTC spike, this correlation is no longer valid, and I would say it never was. It was just a temporary coincidence of trends, as it may happen frequently in many other cases. See below for the update from Tracy Alloway, which also noticed that.

Bitcoin/Avocado correlation is dead. Sell everything. pic.twitter.com/JKr6nGePsr

— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) August 15, 2019

Yes, spurious correlations happen many times, and they can't prove any effective connection between the two examined trends. Do you know, for example, that there is an almost perfect correlation (95,86%) between per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese and civil engineer doctorates awarded? You can find many illogical correlations like this one, visiting the Spurious Correlations website. This is just to demonstrate that you will always find two similar trends, no matter how uncorrelated they may be!

Image credit: Spurious Correlations

Liberstad, Norway - A Private City and a Life Project

We arrive in Liberstad after a journey of about 50 minutes by car, starting from Kristiansand (a south Norwegian city on the sea), and penetrating inland, among hills, lakes, small villages and breathtaking views; we find very little traffic and speed limits that don't exceed 100 km/h.

On the way to Liberstad . picture by the Author

The last stretch, of about 3 km, is a dirt road, but easily passable by car, which goes into the woods and whose maintenance is currently entrusted only to Liberstad AS, since the municipality does not seem to care too much about that. To receive us we find John (general manager of Liberstad) and his wife Sabrina, who live here 365 days a year, with their two children and with John's other business partner, who is busy all the time with the excavator and will pass by when we are going away, just to say hello.

John working - Picture from Liberstad's official website

Liberstad is not only a place of freedom and idealism, but a real company, Liberstad Drift AS; as John explains, there is no escaping taxes and bureaucracy, especially here in Norway. We reach the reception (which displays a flag with the symbol of Anarchy and that of peace, side by side) and we take an American coffee with some excellent sweet rolls (the Norwegian "Boller") prepared by Sabrina; the mugs are decorated with the Bitcoin and Liberstad logos, and John starts telling me how his journey began in 2015, with the study of the Austrian economic school, the interest in crypto, and the curiosity for the private cities. 

Awesome panorama by a lake, in the surroundings of Liberstad - picture by the Author

But, as in all similar cases, rather than looking for a private city to join, the simplest thing was to create one from scratch. Thus he began the search for a suitable plot of land, which lasted about two years until it was identified the area where Liberstad is currently located.
John was a Norwegian businessman and he earned very well, but he felt unhappy and dissatisfied. He decided to quit his job and devote himself full time, and without any remuneration (at least until now) to the construction of the private city.

A view of the property - Picture from Liberstad's official website

The money paid for the purchase of the lots, in fact, is locked on guarantee funds and will be withdrawable only if the project will be carried out as planned, otherwise, it will return to the funders who sent them. Currently, there are more than 100 buyers from all over the world. For some reason, the majority of the buyers are Brasilian, probably because of their growing interest in private cities and new economic paradigms.