And to make it more interesting... An average CPM is $2 (2 dollars for 1000 impressions). If you use the internet for an hour you likely generated ~200 impressions. You could in theory earn about $1 a day for casually using the internet (after Brave's/others' cut).
1. What effect does this have on the spyware/malware side current ads? As an advertiser, I pay some coins to show my ads. Are they still served from the same ad platforms they are today with all the tracking/spyware/malware/etc or are the ads served from some central Brave ad platform where all of that junk is rejected/stripped out?
2. What prevents one actor from buying up all of the tokens over time and opting to horde them rather than showing ads/paying out to users?
No answer to 1. I have no idea what brave's plans are. I can conceive of a locked down ad platform, both whether that would be acceptable to advertisers and worth the tech investment is debatable.
On 2, normal market dynamics. If tokens get hoarded, that increases the value of the remaining tokens. I assume that tokens can be split into arbitrarily small fragments.
There's also nothing stopping Brave from issuing more tokens (either indistinguishable from the original tokens, or a new type of token which is handled in the same way)
What prevents Brave from, instead of requiring these BAT tokens to show advertising on their network, just deciding to charge $ instead? If/when they do that won't it make these tokens worthless?
Nothing that I'm aware of, but nothing stops their users from using regular Chrome if the payments dry up.
There is also scope for click/view fraud also
Even if the original token pool is a fixed size, they could choose to issue another token pool later, so different token types could have different values
Other parties could use the same token scheme for their advertising and not pass anything on to their users
