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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

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Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL but I imagine that the donations are in brave tokens and it may or may not be treated as cash (even though the eventual payout is cash) which may or may not be legal depending on a lot of stuff that's beyond my area of expertise. But if the idea was to 1) create token and 2) YOLO and yeah, lawsuits incoming. But it could be that they have good lawyers and that it is actually legal (although as I write it I don'…

Trusteeship, tax laws and the like typically apply to anything of value, whether it's legally a currency or not. If the tokens are valueless, then what is it they're offering? If they have value, how are they excused from usual rules?

Presumably the same way supermarket vouchers have a cash vale of $0.0000001

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL but I imagine that the donations are in brave tokens and it may or may not be treated as cash (even though the eventual payout is cash) which may or may not be legal depending on a lot of stuff that's beyond my area of expertise. But if the idea was to 1) create token and 2) YOLO and yeah, lawsuits incoming. But it could be that they have good lawyers and that it is actually legal (although as I write it I don'…

Trusteeship, tax laws and the like typically apply to anything of value, whether it's legally a currency or not. If the tokens are valueless, then what is it they're offering? If they have value, how are they excused from usual rules?

Presumably the same way supermarket vouchers have a cash value of $0.0000001

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#203
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)

https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1076221401353207808 Your UI really looks like Tom Scott has signed up to receive donations through you, not like you've scraped his photo and name off twitter and written a fundraising plea with zero mention that he's never heard of you and that you won't even try to contact him until $100 accumulates and then only half-assedly. For most of us this is our first exposure to your m…

That doesn't just look like a scam. That is a scam. You can't just go collecting for causes without being empowered to do so. It's the same as people that go door to door collecting money for some charity when they are actually just going to spend it on their own stuff.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#205

Brendan Eich's defense of this scheme [0] seems a bit weak to me. Do you really think the solution is to make creators opt out? What in the world makes you think it's okay to represent people who have not asked for your assistance and take donations on their behalf? Why is it their responsibility to ask you nicely not to use their name to solicit donations? [0] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/10761873167486156…

This must be against some kind of law, I'm not sure which though.

Identity fraud is against the law. Soliciting donations on behalf of an individual without that individuals consent is fraud.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#206
post #82

I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess. According to https://brave.com/publishers/ - once you have accumulated $100 in contributions they email “the webmaster at your site” and the owner of your domain according to the WHOIS. I assume this is “webmaster@domain.name”, which I sure don’t have set up on my personal site. - you have to “check your balance frequently and…

My impression is that Brave's current model actively hurts small creators that would otherwise get some of that money sooner on the donation services they have signed up for, without waiting for Brave's $100 withdrawal threshold to be reached, if it ever does. I'd be surprised if this will be deemed legal, once more people will find out that there is a company collecting donations in their name and without their cons…

> My impression is that Brave's current model actively hurts small creators that would otherwise get some of that money sooner on the donation services they have signed up for, without waiting for Brave's $100 withdrawal threshold to be reached, if it ever does.

FWIW, you can create an account manually and withdraw with << $100 in your account. $100 is just the limit for them to notify you.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#207
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. Why not Firefox? What are your concerns with it?

Firefox absolutely sucks on Android. It's fine on Mac OS, but it is so much slower than Brave (Chromium based) and Chrome itself, that it becomes irritating to use. That being said, it does support extensions like Ublock Origin and Ghostery. Mobile Chrome means zero extensions and ad hell, so Brave it is. Same Chrome engine and UI (swipeable tabs is something I miss in Firefox Android) and adblocking.

Do you have old hardware? I use Firefox on my Pixel 2 and it's great, especially with ad blocking.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#208
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Containers add-on[0] for Firefox that Mozilla makes has satisfied my need for partitioning. It's on a per-tab basis and also lets you define certain domains to automatically open in a specific container (e.g. Jira always opens in my Work container). I can't really speak to Firefox's performance issues though. I feel like they're just as good on rendering and JS speed, but the overall UI doesn't have the same "fas…

I use the containers add on, and it's pretty much the only real advantage FF has over chrome. Still need user switching although, because sometimes I want to separate multiple google/twitter/etc accounts for example and still want the automatic url-based container activation. If brave implemented containers although, I would probably use it because chrome works better than FF.

If you run Firefox with the -P command line argument, a profile selection screen comes up in which you can create multiple profiles. These are completely separated (down to the HSTS state!) "accounts".

I don't know how MacOS works, but if you set your Firefox shortcut to firefox -P you can switch profiles by restarting Firefox. Granted, it's not as nice as Chrome, but it might still be of worth to you in some way.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the containers add on, and it's pretty much the only real advantage FF has over chrome. Still need user switching although, because sometimes I want to separate multiple google/twitter/etc accounts for example and still want the automatic url-based container activation. If brave implemented containers although, I would probably use it because chrome works better than FF.

If you run Firefox with the -P command line argument, a profile selection screen comes up in which you can create multiple profiles. These are completely separated (down to the HSTS state!) "accounts". I don't know how MacOS works, but if you set your Firefox shortcut to firefox -P you can switch profiles by restarting Firefox. Granted, it's not as nice as Chrome, but it might still be of worth to you in some way.

I know about the -P command, that is why I was referencing the -no-remote option ;) Firefox has multi-user, it's just janky.

You have to double click on your special shortcut with the command line option, and if some other program tries to open a url with firefox as the default browser with the -no-remote / -P command, then it will just not work if you have all users open.

While with chrome it's 2 clicks away and no edge cases making other apps opening urls not work.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#210

I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess. According to https://brave.com/publishers/ - once you have accumulated $100 in contributions they email “the webmaster at your site” and the owner of your domain according to the WHOIS. I assume this is “webmaster@domain.name”, which I sure don’t have set up on my personal site. - you have to “check your balance frequently and…

I work at Brave on the business team. This is helpful feedback. Brave is a startup with a small team earnestly building a new thing that combines a browser with a tipping system, with creator tools, with ad blocking... it's ambitious! As it's a new thing, describing it can be messy sometimes. We're always working to make our language better and clearer though. Thank you for letting us know it fell short for you. To a…

the statements from Brave people on this thread seem reasonable ; many inflammatory comments here do not seem reasonable
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