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