Increasing bitcoin adoption on a global scale is anything but easy. Despite bitcoin providing a more than a valid use case for financial services, a lot of people remain wary of cryptocurrency for the time being. Brave, a browser built around using bitcoin to provide a better advertising experience while surfing the web, is trying to gain market traction. A new feature was announced which will hopefully make this process easier.
Brave Embraces WebTorrent
To put this news into perspective, the Brave team seems quite excited about the WebTorrent protocol. For those who have never heard of this concept, WebTorrent allows web pages to stream content from the BitTorrent network directly to the browser window. Instead of downloading a hard copy of the files onto your PC, the content will be delivered over a stream. A convenient way to access BitTorrent-based content.
It is not surprising to see the Brave team focus on WebTorrent right now. The BitTorrent protocol has seen its ups and downs regarding popularity over the past few years. Streaming is becoming the new way to deliver high-value content to people all over the world, whereas downloading is slowly becoming less popular.
Popular streaming services are catering towards a large audience these days. Combining a high convenience factor and affordable pricing make streaming-based services an absolute success. Then again, Netflix, Amazon, and even Hulu are working on letting users download shows to an SD card for later viewing. It is unclear if this is possible with WebTorrent in its current stage, though.
Having content available to consumers from within the browser directly without external downloads is quite an exciting development. The Brave team has been keeping a close eye on this technology for some time now, albeit the protocol was far from perfect in the beginning. WebTorrent integration works well enough within the Brave browser as we speak and further improvements will be made as the WebTorrent project matures over time.
The bigger question is whether or not this WebTorrent integration will get more people to check out the Brave browser itself. Since the project prides itself upon using bitcoin, integrating this powerful protocol could improve bitcoin adoption in the long run. Then again, once major browsers start integrating WebTorrent as well, there is no again reason to use Brave instead. That is unless one wants a clean advertisement experience, which very few people seem to care about right now.
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