Brave hasn't rounded this corner yet, but I have to imagine that a future feature addition will be trading access to content for payments in BAT. When that happens, whether I care about the volatility will depend on the implementation. If content prices are in dollars, then yes, I suppose I have to accept some of the uncertainty that goes with the fluctuating exchange rate. If it's BAT that I trade for my content, then no--I already got _n_ tokens, they're redeemable for the same amount of content, their market value is meaningless to me. But whatever the case, I'll take it or leave it as a whole, depending on whether it's worth it to me.
> saving a few pennies on transaction costs
The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.
As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?
The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.
Once you can have a single BAT wallet that is used by all your devices (another feature that I assume is in the works), it will make a bit more sense to buy BAT with dollars (instead of with ad views).
If you're making that purchase, you might as well time it with a down-swing in the price (or away from an up-swing). Some users will spend more cycles on timing their buys than others, and those users will have a stabilizing effect on the price.
Also, the price of BAT in USD over the last 60 days has stayed between 0.12 and 0.24... it's not exactly as crazy as you're making it out to be.
> saving a few pennies on transaction costs
The transactions we're talking about (one per ad viewed) are probably in the fractions of a cent. The "few pennies" you refer to is going to be the vast majority of the overall cost of each one (supposing you use traditional payment rails). So yes, an exchange fee on the way in, and another one on the way out, would be far better.
As far as how the content creators feel about bearing the brunt of the volatility... I hate to sound callous, but as a consumer it's not my problem to consider such things. Either the industry finds a way to provide a product that's worth it to me, or it doesn't. I don't buy any other product based on how difficult it was to manufacture, I buy it based on how much it's worth to me. Why should content be any different?
The hassle of keeping track of whether I'm logged into my Washington Post account, my New York times account, etc... and on which device... will never be worth more to me than the content that those sites provide, so the only pay-for-content model I'll patronize is one that distributes my money based on how my attention is allocated without requiring me to guess today where my attention will be tomorrow--and Brave is shaping up to be exactly that.