My main issue with BAT and crypto in general is value fluctuations. If a website is going to get on board with something, they don’t want to build a system that adjusts the price with the value of the token, so I don’t think it could ever replace ads, only be supplemental.

So that’s why I’m interested in Taler. It can be pegged to whatever currency we want without having any concern for transaction fees or anything like that, even across borders. But honestly, I also don’t care what the currency is, I just want a way to pay a website without seeing ads and without making an account.

The implementation doesn’t need to be that complicated, just a header that provides a unique identifier (can change every request), the entity to get payment from (e.g. Mozilla), and a cryptographic signature from that entity that guarantees funds are available. And then the response would be the same as if the user had a no-ads account, and the website would settle up with the payment entity at some interval. So:

• user interaction - load funds, and a local ledger is kept tracking transactions, which is periodically synced with the browser vendor
• website owner interaction - receive and validate headers in lieu of account details; send invoice each month to browser vendor (same overhead as dealing with one customer)

It wouldn’t need to be Mozilla-specific either, it could be a standard that websites could adopt if they so chose. Mozilla and other browser vendors would be motivated to get sites on board because they’d make a cut from these transactions, and they could build plugins for the more popular platforms so adoption is easier. I’m thinking the big news agencies would be the perfect initial customers here, and they could branch out from there.

Picking a ten transaction tool (like Taler) could simplify things, but honestly anything could be used. Mozilla probably wouldn’t be able to convince Google to join, but it could probably be an extension, and they could maybe convince Apple to join.