The Brave team recently posted about a new distributed VPN architecture they’ve been working on called VPN⁰. The goal is to release the first distributed virtual private network that offers a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation system. They will accomplish this by essentially turning your browser into a VPN node that other people can pass traffic through. The way it’s designed is so that there is minimal impact on performance to the person hosting the node. Brave’s distributed VPN removes security risks that are inherent in the centralized VPN model.

Brave Distributed VPN

Node operators would be encouraged to keep their nodes up because they would be getting paid in BAT for providing such services. The VPN end-user would then be paying for those services in BAT. People that host nodes will also have the added benefit of blacklisting certain traffic types and domains that are accessible through the relay. This ensures that the VPN node-operators don’t have to worry about tunneling ethically questionable or illegal traffic through their node.

This reminds me of a piece of technology called a flash proxy where you could embed a piece of JavaScript code and it would facilitate a connection to a Tor relay node. Of course, you couldn’t see what type of traffic was moving between the client and the Tor relay node. Which meant you couldn’t be sure if you were helping someone in North Korea circumvent their repressive government, or helping someone indulge in unethical or illegal behavior. With Brave’s distributed VPN you will be able to specify which sites are blacklisted through your node, thereby offloading the ethical and legal questions that surround passing of such traffic.

In other news, the Brave team recently released their bi-directional wallet in the official release version. This has been available in the developer version for quite some time now. If you follow the steps in this post here, you should be able to link your bank account and withdraw BAT that you earned from watching advertisements, or earned from people tipping your Brave verified account. Uphold charges no withdraw fee but there is a 1.95% exchange fee. After withdrawing BAT, you should receive funds in your bank account within 5 to 7 business days. I just withdrew about $18 worth of BAT today so I will update this post when the funds hit my account.

UPDATE: It took 48 hours for the funds to show up as pending in my bank account. I will update this post again when it clears.



Withdrawing BAT to Bank

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Please consider downloading the Brave browser. It is one of my favorite products in crypto and I use it daily. It is a browser that respects your privacy, allows you to make money by watching advertisements, and lets you donate directly to content creators. Using the referral link here for the download would be greatly appreciated as well.