Brave Software, a start-up reinventing the browser as a user platform for speed, privacy, and micropayments, has announced the beta version of Brave Payments – its bitcoin-based micropayments system.

“For the first time in the history of web browsers, people can now seamlessly reward the sites whose content they value and wish to support, while remaining untracked by anyone, including us at Brave Software, Inc.”, said Brendan Eich, President and CEO of Brave Software, in a blog post.

With Brave Payments, users can send small payments to sites, at whatever aggregate support level they choose. Eich admits that users shouldn’t have to pay anything to avoid ads, but if a website relies on ad revenue, Brave Payments is a way to help these sites, effectively and privately, while blocking ads.

Users need to turn on Brave Payments from within Brave’s preferences page, fund their Brave wallet, and then browse as usual. Eich explains that while everything is automatic, the Brave Payments UI, when enabled, allows users to control which sites receive their support by manually enabling or disabling funding for any of the sites they visit. 

“This removes the need for intermediaries who may overwhelm web pages with invasive trackers and ads (and sometimes even malware). It also avoids centrally managed “feed” algorithms that may or may not value your idea of content quality”, he added.

The Anonize protocol over the network and statistical voting on-device ensures that user identity remains concealed – Brave Software or any other entity cannot correlate browsing page views with payments. Publishers can collect their aggregated donations after authenticating themselves.

“By integrating Bitcoin under-the-hood with Brave Payments today, along with the faster and more secure ad-free and tracker-free browsing already in Brave, we hope to gain enough loyal users so that, with your help, we can collaborate on a truly private (even decentralized) eventual standard for web payments”, he added. “We believe Brave Payments will also help reform the ad-tech ecosystem by giving both browser users and website content creators the fair deal that they deserve, based on ownership of their data.”

Brave Software has partnered with BitGo, to support the per-user Brave wallets that hold users’ Bitcoin-denominated funds for making Brave Payments; with Coinbase, to make it easy for all users to buy Bitcoin from within Brave via the Coinbase Buy Widget; and with Private Internet Access, to mask the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of its users from its servers.