Because I can use them to buy something in the arcade, at a price I can check for reasonability beforehand.

What can I buy using the Basic Attention Token? And at what price?

Advertisers will buy ads with it. Publishers will collect most of that spend. Users will get some too. The value will fluctuate but all currency does that.

Except for a small problem: None of that will happen.

Nobody will switch from Chrome, Safari or Firefox to the "Brave Browser" in order to have ads injected into their browsing session.

The concept is so fundamentally ridiculous that I can't even muster pity for the people who sunk their money into this scam.

I use Brave, and there's about a half million other people who are using it too. What I guess you really mean is not that "nobody" will switch, but that "everyone" won't. So it's just a matter of market size, which I agree - we'll see.

Where do you get the half a million number from? Is that people that use it or downloads?

Out of curiosity, why did you start using the Brave browser?

Mostly because I wanted to get the (faster browsing) benefits of ad blocking, without feeling like I'm stealing from the sites I visit.