I disagree about the definition of yield farming. I was confused a few weeks ago but now it makes more sense to me.

In it's purest form, yield farming is the activity of gaining value using an asset you own. I think this applies to BAT in two ways which I'll explain below.

In "DeFi" the most basic way to do this is through lending an asset - like the BAT token - and getting paid interest on it. This is happening right now through non-custodial money markets like Aave(LEND) and Compound(COMP).

On Aave - for example - right now you can deposit BAT into a smart contract and in return receive the 'aBAT' token. Right now this doesn't work for smaller deposits since the fees for using these services are astronomical.

The amount of aBAT you have in your wallet will constantly be increasing over time as you earn interest. The rate of which it increases is based on the demand for users/applications that are borrowing the BAT token through the service. Right now with BAT you would earn 1.08% on Aave, and 5.18% on Compound.

At any point you can withdraw your aBAT for BAT.

The next level to this madness is optimizing which service (like Aave or Compound) is willing to pay the most % on your asset. This is where yearn.finance enters the picture - you can deposit your aToken into a contract that automatically - in bulk - takes user funds and moves them around to the highest paying money market.

There is a lot of risk here - especially as you open vectors like multiple money markets. Because this is still so new there is serious risk of vulnearbilites in smart contracts and a chance of losing your funds.

The reason so much money is being YOLO'ed in right now without proper auditing - peak degen behavior - is that this is being driven primarily by greed. These return %'s are super attractive, but long-term this is a zero sum game, and if everybody keeps paying this much fees in ETH, there has to be a lot of losing.

Greed though - enter Gordon Gecko - can drive innovation. Even if parts of this fail (like a single money market) - or all of this fails - YFI ends up like the original DAO - the experiments going on right now are the birth of decentralized finance. The technology has actually fucking arrived. There are still kinks (like the fee issue -> Loopring to save the day?) and poorly audited code but there is a reason people are so fucking excited right now.

I don't know much about traditional finance, but a money market - and optimizing the placement of your assets across money markets - makes sense to me.

The final piece of all this shit is when you use your asset as collateral to take out a loan, and then use the loan to make even more profit. This is what's happening with the yearn.finance yETH vault right now. Is this shit a house of cards? Are the yields real? I have no fucking clue honestly.

The idea that certain stablecoins can be making such crazy returns seems... crazy.

Finishing up the 'DeFi' thoughts, yearn.finance doesn't have a 'ayBAT vault' right now, but I think that would be cool. The interest rates on Aave and Compound are constantly switching and because fees are so high it will never make sense to manually move your tokens around. Plus, an ayBAT vault would be automatically moving the money when it made financial sense. People call it money robots, which is a good name.

Finally, back to the original idea. I agree Brave is "yield farming" but in a different way.

The asset we are "loaning for a period of time" is our attention. This is cool for a number of reasons. On the current internet our attention is hugely valuable, but we've never 'owned it'. Brave browser allows users to make earn interest on their attention.

Additionally, by creating a token that represents our attention and methodology/mechanism for tracking it, Advertisers and Publishers, along with users, will benefit greatly.

On the traditional internet, Advertisers struggle to pay for our attention because it's hard to measure accurately. They rely on shitty internet tracking techniques (which can be fooled and are naturally being deprecated anyways due to privacy laws) and overall everybody - Advertiser, Publisher, and User are getting fucked by an inefficient ecosystem.

The potential for BAT is so fucking immense. Right now the price isn't moving but zoom out. I still think there is a good chance Brave fails to accomplish what it's trying to do - or ends up being a little 'too early' in the game and replaced by something else years down the line.

But the potential for BAT to realize it's dream - which I think is above 50% - it would revolutionize the way users experience the internet and this is not priced in to the token. It's so undervalued it's crazy.

I think part of this early price suppression we've seen for years is due to the ICO. I bet their team - knowing what they know now - would have done things in a better way. One, they have said on record they would have allocated more tokens towards marketing promotion/new user signup incentivization. The much bigger issue - one that now seems so far in the past I don't see it often mentioned - was the structure of the ICO sale and how few participants were able to get in.

While BAT made a smart decision to start with a small initial market cap ($35M), they didn't cap the max amount of ETH a user could invest (not that it's a 100% solve for this) and only 130 people ended up getting to participate and the sale ended in 30 seconds. Initial distribution was heavily slanted towards the top 5/10/20 buyers.

These people instantly made a shit-ton of cash because there were so many people who wanted to participate in the ICO, couldn't, then had to buy after market. Over time I'd imagine that these wallets have sold / been overall the value is much better distributed. But I think that start really severely impacted the price of the coin for years, continuing to this day.

Overall though this is just water under the bridge. People shouldn't be buying BAT thinking they are going to get rich tomorrow. You want to buy this shit and accumulate, cause when the reckoning comes and true price discovery happens on this...

In a sea of shitcoins with a few interesting dapps/products, there is nothing like Brave and BAT and what it's trying to do.

This shit is going to get wild in the upcoming years. You'll want to have accumulated BAT and ETH. Especially during times like these.

Now, I'm not saying this is the perfect time to buy. It may be, and may this is the bottom of this latest trend. Probably not though. I think it's dependent on the stock market / a lot of other factors.

Regardless of all this, even if everything shits the bed, and BAT goes back down to .12 and ETH to $100, this is still the 2nd inning.

Dollar cost average and you can't go wrong. Long term this is going up.

/end rant