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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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
