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How is Brave a cryptocurrency scam?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chaxor 4y ago
Its not, but a lot of HN folks are blinded by their own stupidity whenever they see the word 'crypto'. The knee jerk reaction to that word shields them from any engagement in thought - it's just simply "some association with crypto? - it's terrible!". This phenomenon early on was even targeted at simply cryptography based security (Although not super common on HN thankfully), since the word 'crypto' was associated with the software. Ironically, it was born as a response to the crypto-crazed people that had the same thoughtless reaction in reverse
- monetus 4y ago
  They were, for a time, taking donations on behalf of websites despite those websites not knowing that brave existed, or the donors not knowing that their donation was going to an unclaimed wallet. I can't remember what happened to the BAT - held for them if they ever did pick up brave I think, but eventually dumped back into the BAT pool. That, and substituting Amazon referral links, engendered distrust that is hard to overstate. Do you think is just a crypto=bad thing alone? That wasn't my impression.
  - monetus 4y ago
    It actually wasn't Amazon links, but links to sites partnered with brave, like binance and Coinbase. They didn't seem to know about it ahead of time.
  - soundnote 4y ago
    Not Amazon referral links. More like Firefox Suggest or the like: Write eg. "Binance" in the URL bar, and one of the results in the dropdown menu is a sponsored link to "binance.us" who are partnered with Brave. The feature had a bug that caused complete, valid URLs (ie. you wrote "binance.us") to be shown the sponsored link as a primary completion option. The issue persisted, as far as I know, one day. The response was to both fix the bug and make the feature be off by default.
    - monetus 4y ago
      Indeed, I couldn't edit my comment.
- mort96 4y ago
  This isn't about just using cryptocurrency, there are absolutely uses of cryptocurrency which I wouldn't describe as a scam. Here's what's making me call Brave a scam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620
wombatmoose 4y ago
It isn't. hn just tends to be salty about anything related to crypto.
- monetus 4y ago
  Well, they did mislead people on where that crypto went at one point, and at one point also hijacked Amazon referral links. The anti-brave sentiment isn't all anti-crypto zeal, imo. Edit: it wasn't Amazon referral links but companies that had partnered with brave.
  - fastball 4y ago
    The first mistake they fixed very quickly, and "mislead" is a bit strong – they were explicit in their terms about where the crypto was going. Not sure the Amazon link thing is true at all. What I remember is that there was a Binance referral link that was built-in to the browser, which would show up at the top of auto-complete when you started typing "binance" in the URL bar.
    - monetus 4y ago
      Oh, you're right about the autocomplete - which seems to have been restricted to not just binance, but a few other partnered companies - it might be a bit blown out of proportion - Still have to consider it and look at the UI; unwittingly using the auto-complete could be a dark pattern, like YouTube making misclicks on ads very easy. I'm guessing atm that that wasn't the intention or case. They did have to remove the referral links according the press release though right? I'd argue that the UI of the brave donation feature had been a dark pattern however, even if they made it so unintentionally.
msla 4y ago
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 > They added UI to the browser to claim users could pay individual site creators who'd signed up, but had scraped the names and photos of site creators who'd never heard of them. Brave planned to take the payments after they were unclaimed for 90 days. When caught, they claimed the funds were held "in escrow" but later admitted there were holding the funds themselves. Story broke here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
- fastball 4y ago
  Anyone have a screen grab of what this actually looked like? All the articles reference a Tom Scott tweet which is deleted, so not very helpful.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Its not, but a lot of HN folks are blinded by their own stupidity whenever they see the word 'crypto'. The knee jerk reaction to that word shields them from any engagement in thought - it's just simply "some association with crypto? - it's terrible!". This phenomenon early on was even targeted at simply cryptography based security (Although not super common on HN thankfully), since the word 'crypto' was associated with the software. Ironically, it was born as a response to the crypto-crazed people that had the same thoughtless reaction in reverse

monetus 4y ago
They were, for a time, taking donations on behalf of websites despite those websites not knowing that brave existed, or the donors not knowing that their donation was going to an unclaimed wallet. I can't remember what happened to the BAT - held for them if they ever did pick up brave I think, but eventually dumped back into the BAT pool. That, and substituting Amazon referral links, engendered distrust that is hard to overstate. Do you think is just a crypto=bad thing alone? That wasn't my impression.
- monetus 4y ago
  It actually wasn't Amazon links, but links to sites partnered with brave, like binance and Coinbase. They didn't seem to know about it ahead of time.
- soundnote 4y ago
  Not Amazon referral links. More like Firefox Suggest or the like: Write eg. "Binance" in the URL bar, and one of the results in the dropdown menu is a sponsored link to "binance.us" who are partnered with Brave. The feature had a bug that caused complete, valid URLs (ie. you wrote "binance.us") to be shown the sponsored link as a primary completion option. The issue persisted, as far as I know, one day. The response was to both fix the bug and make the feature be off by default.
  - monetus 4y ago
    Indeed, I couldn't edit my comment.
mort96 4y ago
This isn't about just using cryptocurrency, there are absolutely uses of cryptocurrency which I wouldn't describe as a scam. Here's what's making me call Brave a scam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620

wombatmoose 4y ago

It isn't. hn just tends to be salty about anything related to crypto.

monetus 4y ago
Well, they did mislead people on where that crypto went at one point, and at one point also hijacked Amazon referral links. The anti-brave sentiment isn't all anti-crypto zeal, imo. Edit: it wasn't Amazon referral links but companies that had partnered with brave.
- fastball 4y ago
  The first mistake they fixed very quickly, and "mislead" is a bit strong – they were explicit in their terms about where the crypto was going. Not sure the Amazon link thing is true at all. What I remember is that there was a Binance referral link that was built-in to the browser, which would show up at the top of auto-complete when you started typing "binance" in the URL bar.
  - monetus 4y ago
    Oh, you're right about the autocomplete - which seems to have been restricted to not just binance, but a few other partnered companies - it might be a bit blown out of proportion - Still have to consider it and look at the UI; unwittingly using the auto-complete could be a dark pattern, like YouTube making misclicks on ads very easy. I'm guessing atm that that wasn't the intention or case. They did have to remove the referral links according the press release though right? I'd argue that the UI of the brave donation feature had been a dark pattern however, even if they made it so unintentionally.

msla 4y ago

https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 > They added UI to the browser to claim users could pay individual site creators who'd signed up, but had scraped the names and photos of site creators who'd never heard of them. Brave planned to take the payments after they were unclaimed for 90 days. When caught, they claimed the funds were held "in escrow" but later admitted there were holding the funds themselves. Story broke here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

fastball 4y ago
Anyone have a screen grab of what this actually looked like? All the articles reference a Tom Scott tweet which is deleted, so not very helpful.