I (rather diligently) accepted 10 ads an hour on Brave for about a year, received BAT regularly, and immediately converted it to BTC upon receipt. Eventually my BAT payments stopped coming (I somehow got algorithmically blocked and didn't bother opening a ticket with Brave for almost another year), but I withdrew the BTC from Uphold and it's worth about $450 now. That's like being paid almost 40 bucks a month to just go about your business while browsing the web!

IMO this is mind-blowing, tangible proof that micropayments in return for my time and attention works. Imagine a world where our attention is actually valued and rewarded, where all people receive income through many various streams as they navigate the physical and digital worlds. We can argue back and forth about pros/cons/ethics of arriving at my anecdotal valuation (bitcoin, crypto, etc), but that's not my point -- the point is that this type of system actually does function, and in theory could raise tides enough across the world to lift all boats in really positive ways.

Tangential, but Michael Saylor has also opined about how this type of micro-payment / micro-staking could go in the opposite direction, using smart contracts and Lightning to escrow fractional tokens to participate in social media or even prevent DDOS attacks if woven into the underlying networking appropriately. Obviously I'm skeptical about certain latencies that would be added but, conceptually, forcing people to have SOME skin in the game and doing it in an invisible, frictionless way is quite intriguing.

Anyways, just one man's journey from Milan to Minsk by way of Brave and BAT lol