Just as an FYI, Brave has done some sketchy stuff in the past, including inserting affiliate links / ads into content.
When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.
This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.
“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” —Mark Twain
Within 48 hours we had a new build of Brave out which held the tips locally, in the browser. The tip would be attempted for up to 90 days; if the unverified publisher were to verify within that time, the tip would be sent to their wallet. If the 90 days passed, the user's BAT would be released within the browser to be distributed elsewhere.
You can read more about these changes in our blog post from December of 2018: https://brave.com/rewards-update/.
Great, I love being incorrect and learning something new.
> In 2018, Brave users could tip unverified content creators with BAT. Those tokens would go into a settlement wallet until claimed by the intended recipient. This was a bad design.
So it wasn't incorrect or misinformation then?
Glad you've fixed that shitty practice but that doesn't expunge it from history or make the fact anyone in a decision making position thought that was in any way ethical/acceptable.
The change we made kept the tokens on the user's device. We also introduced better UI/UX as well, with many thanks to our community for helping us spot some areas for improvement. Although I'm part of the team, I still stand in awe of those few days in December, 2018. A great, yet flawed, system was radically improved in a matter of hours with a few small (yet profound) changes. And it wouldn't have been possible without Brave's incredibly engaged community.