That's the issue, the success of BAT depends on the popularity of the browser. Making a new browser popular is not easy.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, Brave is a fine browser, I have to say.
But 500.000 downloads doesn't mean 500.000 users.
I downloaded a lot of stuff from the Google Play store that I never used afterwards or uninstalled within 5 minutes.
So maybe there's 100.000 active users of Brave.
In the W3C Global Webbrowser market share of may 2017, Brave doesn't show up:
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.phpBrowser & Platform Market Share
May 2017
Top 10 Web Browsers
1 Chrome 58 28.38%
2 Safari 10 12.13%
3 Chrome 57 9.58%
4 Firefox 53 5.58%
5 IE 11 4.15%
6 Chrome 49 3.01%
7 UC 11 2.58%
8 Chrome 55 2.02%
9 Chrome 56 1.93%
10 IE 14 1.88%
There's only one reason why BAT is so expensive right now; whales manipulate the market.
If we had 5,000 ICO participants, there would be more BAT on the "sell" side of Bittrex.
Imagine: 1,500,000,000 BAT tokens and only 41,000,000 on Bittrex? ... wait until the dumping starts...